My friend Bridget Phetasy recently replied to this highly accurate meme on X, and it made me laugh.

Possibly drunk, I felt compelled to respond.

Challenge accepted.

I had my assignment.

I’d write about all the ways my wife and I could raise our two kids Gen X and how in the end it would be really good for them for reasons of confidence, self-reliance and proper taste in music.

Then a funny thing happened.

As I started thinking about how we could raise our kids Gen X, I realized … WE ALREADY WERE.

Every time I thought of a funny or real Gen X thing, it was like, oh hey what, we’re doing that. Obviously, it’s not 1988, and we’re not checking every single Gen X box, but, come on, our third graders already have very strong opinions about Full House.

Now … I know what some of you are thinking.

You might say it reflects poorly upon me not to have a parenting strategy of which I am even conscious at all.

My response is that it is the most Gen X thing possible to not even have a parenting strategy.

Oh, you’re a Tiger Parent? I’m a Keep My Kids Alive and Teach Them Not to Be A Chucklehead Parent, nice to meet you. Yes, I was born between 1965 and 1980. How could you tell?

Without even ever discussing it, my wife Jen (a standard issue Gen-X name if there ever was one) and I are teaching our children The Old Ways. //

By today’s standards, our childhood was basically a series of OSHA violations. We ate too many Pop-Tarts, rode in the back of station wagons without seatbelts, lived in constant fear of being kidnapped by a creepy guy in a white van named Lester and got most of our hydration and immunity from garden hoses. But we also learned how to exist without constant supervision, how to entertain ourselves without a screen, how to handle differences of opinion away from adults and how to venture forth from the house without a subcutaneous GPS chip.

The Old Ways are the good ways.

With any luck, one day my kids will grow up, roll their eyes at the next generation, and mutter, they’re the worst. //

A Gen-X sibling who had sisters and a single landline will be the one who brings peace to the Middle East.