You Can Pick You Nose But You Can't Pick Your Kids

While my son Alex still habitually picks his nose and eats it-- which disgusts me to no end-- I am also proud to say that he can now execute another, more elegant pick-- the pick-and-roll, which he performed perfectly with his buddy Luke in a basketball scrimmage the other day . . . this was one of my proudest moments as a dad (it competes with watching him proficiently snowboard) because, let's face it, as your kids get older, you're not going to have much influence over their behavior, morals, and/or attitude-- you might get them to say "please" and "thank you" but the rest is a combination of genes and peer influence (read the groundbreaking book by Judith Harris on this topic: The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do) . . and so if all the kids are getting cell-phones implanted in their buttocks, then you're probably not going to convince your kid to do otherwise-- and if you join the party, then you'll just be a weird old wannabe hipster with a cell-phone implanted in your buttocks, so there's just no way to keep up with them . . . really the only way you can have some sort of permanent influence on your children is if you teach them a specific skill, especially if that skill will have a influence on their life in the future . . . I didn't learn to snowboard until I was twenty-two and I didn't learn the pick-and-roll until after that (I was developmentally challenged as a basketball player) and, despite learning them late, both these skills have had a great influence on my life: snowboarding became one of my favorite sports and encouraged me to travel to a lot of places I never would have gone, and I still play pick-up basketball to keep in shape, so seeing my son learn these things at age ten makes me very happy.