Parental Power!

I recently remembered a conversation that hubby and I had years ago, before we had kids. We were talking about parenting and how parents really create a culture for their children. Then we thought how funny it would be to have kids and raise them as an experiment. We could make up strange holidays and weird traditions that would feel normal to the kids, but no one else would understand, like Spatula Day. We could teach them that this annual event commemorated the invention of the frying pan, and that it was celebrated by wearing a spatula on your belt and greeting each other with flailing arms, saying "Hail Teflon!".

(And our kids would look like some cross between the Walmart happy face and Ralph Wiggum.)

When we decided to have kids, though, we forgot all about our experiment idea.
 The reason I'd been thinking about this again is that I think we ended up doing it anyway by accident. We seem to have raised kids who (like their parents) just don't fit in anywhere. They behave in strange, counter-cultural ways. No, no, we don't celebrate Spatula Day, but we seem to have done some equally weird things to our kids. For example, they think that "shut up" and "stupid" are swear words. Also, they think that it's normal to want to spend time with their parents, to think independently of their friends and to spend free time outside. Oh, and they're vegetarians. Poor kids, how will they ever be productive members of society now?!