Unleash your child's inner geek

One of the most important responsibilities of being a parent is making sure your child grows up to become a truthful, kind, and ethical person.

But as admirable as all that stuff is, there’s one trait that’s even more important to encourage. You need to make sure your children grow up to be geeks.

The geek will inherit the earth

It’s all very well encouraging your kids to become doctors, lawyers and architects, but geekdom is where the real money is.

Look at Bill Gates and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Do you think they got where they are today by hard work, education, and natural intelligence? Of course not! Their success is all down to being able to recite the original episode order of Star Trek and be able to debate who would win in a fight: Batman or Spider-Man. They are geeks, and they are proud of it.

A geek is basically anyone who has an intense passion for something. You can be a Harry Potter geek, a lego geek or comicbook geek. You can even be a history geek, sports geek or a science geek. And these days being a geek isn’t even considered a bad thing. Being a geek is cool. No, honestly, it is.

It can be a little trickier however to foster geekyness if you have a daughter rather than a son. Society puts huge pressure on girls to go down the pink and sparkly route, so even more encouragement is needed to prod them in the right direction.

But it’s worth the effort. Developing passionate enthusiasms is a great way to combat the trend for kids to grow up too quickly. Let's face it, I’m 35 and haven’t grown up yet and I owe it all to Star Wars, superheroes, and computer games. 

If it worked for me, it'll work for them too.

So find something your child has a passion for, and sit down with them and nurture it - be it dinosaurs, Dr Who, astronomy or ponies. They’ll more than likely emerge the other side a happier and more engaged person for it, and that can only be a good thing.

Photo: Dan Hughes Dan's daughter Amy