Disinherit your kid and other parenting hacks
Over the years of extensive presidential reading, I’ve accumulated a few parenting tips. Many are transferable to other relationships. Most of them are pretty terrible, so I don’t recommend applying them to any relationship, but I’m sharing them nonetheless.
Don’t raise weaklings. Disinherit them if you need to.
Theodore Roosevelt said “I would rather one of them die than have them grow up as weaklings.” In private. Because that’s harsh. Publicly, he softened it. He’d just disinherit any of his boys who wouldn’t play college sports. That doesn’t seem drastic at all.
As eyeroll-inducing as this is… I should point out that later in life, he was instrumental in changing the rules of football to make it less dangerous.
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“Turn your other cheek once but if he smites it, then punch him.”
Dr. Henry John Minthorn, Herbert Hoover’s uncle and adopted father, was a Quaker pacifist. He was all about turning his other cheek. But not about letting his nephew/adopted son get taken advantage of.
Side note: Minthorn was a surgeon in the Union Army and a participant in the Underground Railroad when younger. He’s also the guy who saved Hoover’s life at age 2, after Hoover had been declared dead by his father.
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Let someone else raise your kids. And withhold your love until they are in the top 10 in their class.
Of John Qunicy and Louisa’s four children who lived to adulthood, two were raised by family members … for the good of the family and the country. Both of those boys were met with tragic ends, far too young. The pressure was piled on — with JQA refusing to even let his son visit him until he was in the top 10 of his class.
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Don’t raise a nepo baby.
Unless it’s YOUR nepo baby. Or maybe you are also a nepo baby. John Quincy Adams frowned upon nepotism, but dabbled in it recreationally.
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Tie a cowbell around your kid so you don’t lose them.
That’s what James Buchanan’s mom did and he turned fine maybe.
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When you drop your kid off at a random hotel while you gamble, don’t forget which hotel you dropped them off at.
Take it from Oscar Folsom, Grover Cleveland’s law partner, friend, and future late father-in-law. Make note of where you drop off your kid when you’re gambling. Or racing. Or when gambling on a race you are racing in. Basically, just write down the hotel or something so you don’t forget. It’s important that you retrieve your kid later.
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Whatever this is.
POWs were considered traitors by the Soviets during WWII. When Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov was captured, he could have swapped him for a German POW. Instead, he threw his daughter-in-law in jail because WTF she’s married to a traitor!!
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Don’t eff it up.
As Jackie Kennedy noted, “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.”
No pressure.
