2024 was Milo’s year of conscious mainstreaming.

At the start of February, as he did in early 2023, Milo stood up to pitch his classmates on why they should vote him in as one of their Student Representative Council (SRC) nominees. His central promise, which he rehearsed many times, was to explore what additional opportunities might be made available to gifted mathematics students. Clearly this is an important, meaningful and well-considered pitch but, in the populist world of 2024, ideas that are important, meaningful and well-considered are rarely rewarded in the cut-throat world of classroom politics.

Milo was, for the second year in a row, sadly unsuccessful in his campaign. And he lost out to a guy who suggested his classmates should vote for him because he is ‘ravishingly handsome’. Populism at work.

Certainly, Milo’s classroom disappointment was not the only reason he decided to embrace ‘conscious mainstreaming’ this year; for example readers will recall that by February the basketball revolution had already begun in our house. But it certainly got him thinking.

During our bedtime debrief on the evening of the SRC vote, Milo said he didn’t mind that he would not be on the SRC, but he did plan to try to ‘meet more people’ in 2024, and ‘do some different things’. He had thereby decided to suspend his chess lessons with Boris, and he was going to wind down his reading from 4-5 hours (including every non-classroom minute at school) to about 1-2. As I said, conscious. Nothing has ever been by accident with this child.

And that is exactly what happened. As the year progressed we got less Keeper of the Lost Cities, and more skibidi toilet. Less hair ribbons and plush monkeys, and more basketball jerseys. Many more basketball jerseys.

And as a parent it is very easy to feel good about such a transition. Milo’s group of friends at school has expanded rapidly, at this year’s school disco he tried to chug a Coca-Cola and build a human pyramid with his friends, last year he literally lay on the stage underneath the booming speaker and read his book. Birthday parties, the dreaded athletics carnival and lunchtime at school are all easier for him than they were 12 months ago. He is happy.

But how much of their weird should we support our children to smooth over? To mainstream? In the pursuance of social comforts? We read a lot of Stories for Boys Who Dare to Be Different and Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls in our house. That sort of genre; stories about kids who are slightly left of centre but who go on to invent something, or conquer something, or save something, or just generally make the world more awesome. As a general rule, these kids are not being voted onto the SRC, nor singing skibidi toilet, nor building a human pyramid at the disco. They are much more likely to be reading their book on stage under the booming speaker and advocating for mathematics programs for gifted students.

But also, most of them don’t report having a particularly happy childhood.

So where does this leave us? Well, firstly most of us adults never really figure out how to completely resist the lure of social acceptance in pursuance of our true selves do we? So it is perhaps unreasonable to expect that of a ten year old. And secondly, us adults are also pretty hopeless at defining what we are all trying to do with our lives anyway; the concepts of success and happiness are intertwined and elusive, and unique to each of us. If we can’t define it for ourselves, how can we adequately counsel our children on what they should be striving for? Is it better to spend time memorising pi to 200 digits by yourself, or learning the intricacies of ohio skibidi rizz with your buddies?

Certainly in our house we have no profound answers to these foundational life questions that we can usefully share with our children. But, as a mostly-adult it seems pretty clear to me that the secret sauce of life is to figure out what you like, and the kind of things that make you feel good, and then be and do as much and as many of those things as is possible, as often as you can.

Of course the tricky bit of my half-assed Hallmark wisdom is that figuring out those things takes time, and experimentation, perhaps some heartache and disappointment, and then just when you think you are getting them all in a row, they unhelpfully shift to the left and nudge your rows out of alignment.

Clearly Milo is just at the early stages of figuring out what his things are; an exciting and never-ending journey for him, as it is for all of us. Boris is back, on a fortnightly basis now, reading remains at a solid 2 hours a day, and pi remains lodged in his brain to a certain extent. But as we move into 2025, The Griddy and The Orange Justice continue to enjoy prominence in our house (google them if you don’t know, I had to) and obscure basketball statistics from the 20th century have seized centre stage.

Weird is good still continues to spill from Milo and Monty’s mouths with reasonable regularity. This is pleasing because in lieu of any real life guidance, being as weird as you are comfortable being is a fine foundation for two young lads who are figuring out their things, and deciding the best way to pitch for the SRC, or if they even care about that at all.

Happy 2025 everybody.

How to do the Griddy