Beyond Your Control

You can't dictate your sons' SSH ranks

A traditionalist Christian laments the inability of parents to ensure that their children don’t stray from the hard and narrow path:

In many spheres of my personal and public life within the last year, the incidents of Trad families with wayward-leaning children has grown to at least a dozen. It is my belief that the Traditionalist Christian society in America (not just Catholics) is experiencing a very big epidemic of kids who are disowning the faith of their parents--or even the parents, themselves.

This is such an enormous tragedy. You’ve climbed over mountains of pain and passed through crucibles of fire to find the peace of Jesus Christ. You only want to do the right thing. You end up marrying, and you have a good batch of children. You pour your heart into them. They are the very purpose of your existence--your reason for being. All of your happiness depends upon their success. You sacrifice and give up the things you loved doing. You do with less so that you can give them nourishment. You modify your behavior and become boring and wholesome for them. You probably even homeschool them, teach them, encourage them. They are in your thoughts most of the day. You pray for them, and you teach them to pray. You warn them about the evils of the world, how your little family is surrounded by orcs, goblins, and devils. You take them to church, drive them to church functions, keep a wholesome setting throughout their childhood.

Then they turn 18 and have lots of cocaine-fueled gay sex. Or something like that.

These people whom you brought into this world made their choices. You gave them the best shot a kid could get in the 21st Century. They should be so lucky. Instead, they squander everything you built for them.

The author is a little black-pilled for my liking, but his core message is essentially correct. As difficult as it might be for the Alpha father, the probabilities are that he’s going to end up with, at best, a Bravo son. He may well end up with a Gamma son who will no doubt blame his father for all of his various shortcomings.

Genetics are unpredictable. Sometimes a great athlete like Archie Manning has sons like Cooper, Peyton, and Eli who surpass him. But much more often, he doesn’t. All of Lebron James’s best efforts haven’t made Bronny James an NBA star, while Michael Jordan’s son didn’t even make it to the NBA.

In business, the track record is arguably even worse. Thomas Watson Jr. exceeded his father’s accomplishments at IBM, but where are the second generations at Microsoft, Apple, or Google? From Atari to Minecraft, not a single game company saw its founders succeeded by the sons of the founders.

Now, what you can do is make sure that your children know the truth of things. So if they reject the truth of Christianity, at least they are actively choosing to disbelieve and have the chance to return to the faith once they see the consequences of their evil are precisely as they were taught. Your daughters can recognize Gammas and avoid them while knowing the price they may pay if they decide to chase Alphas. And while your sons will be what they are, at least they can learn how to maximize their situations to their own benefit and know how to more effectively interact with other men.

The world is what it is and our ability to change it is limited and transient. The more one accepts those realities, the more effectively one can exercise the abilities one has. And as much as we would like to do so, we can’t fight our children’s battles for them. All we can do is make sure they are prepared to do so themselves.