Roll for Geekiness I have a confession to make to you, dear readers. While I am a geek by most qualifying standards of the definition, my children so far do not share similar interests. Some progress has been made on the older one as he enjoys Anime, but that’s just because it’s less to read than a novel for which he has little interest. The middle one — he likes Star Wars but that is about it. He’s a sportsman at heart, playing football and baseball. While I did play baseball myself for many years, the geek side eventually won out over that. The youngest, my daughter, is my final hope in raising a true geek. Not withstanding, whatever they choose to do that makes them happy, makes me happy and I will not take that away from them because of my own selfish motives. It leads me to think though, what makes a geek? That is, when is that personality trait truly indoctrinated in the brain? When did I become a geek and set upon my own path in geekdom? While I do tend to think I embody the true sense of being a geekdad, I have to wonder what we are doing to raise the next generation of geeks to replace us and when in their lives does that training begin and stop. I suppose it’s sort of like Jedi training, perhaps it never stops. For myself, my father was an engineer, a total math and logic geek. I started out early with logic puzzles and Lego blocks. Of course I was into Star Wars, Star Trek and my father’s expansive science fiction book collection. To that end, anything geeky you can think of, comics and so on, I was into and throughly enjoyed. So in searching my memory, when was the day that the switch in my personality clicked and I was destined to be a geek for life? I don’t think I can pinpoint the day, or the year, but when I read an article that claims that age seven is the cutoff for personality development I almost have to agree. The study shows that as early as first grade the personality traits exhibited by children are precursors to adult personality traits. Clearly this doesn’t mean the age appropriate behavior, like whining about having to go to bed and believing there are monsters in the closet. Which there are of course, but as long as you keep the closet doors closed and don’t look at them they can’t get out. Unless they are Aliens or Morlocks , in which case you are screwed. “We remain recognizably the same person,” said study author Christopher Nave, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside. “This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts.” The study looked at about 2,400 ethnically diverse children in grade school – in Hawaii. I find this statistic of the study to be very interesting. Why Hawaii? In the 1960’s when the study began – how racially diverse was Hawaii? Frankly, I don’t think race is as important as environment. More on that in a moment. The researchers compared personality ratings of the children with video taped interviews 40 years later. While not looking at “geek” as a specific personality trait, some of the traits they did study do carry into certain geek behaviors. They looked at both sides of the following personality traits; talkativeness (verbal fluency), adaptability (coping with new situations), impulsiveness and self-minimizing behavior (humility.) What they found, and what is going to be argued when this study is published in an upcoming issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science , is that the traits as they were exhibited by children directly translated to similar traits in adults. The challenge there is that these are pretty basic traits of general psychology. I learned about these behaviors in Psychology 101, and either side of any of these traits could be applied to almost anyone. Also, starting a study in the 1960’s to now could be something that could challenge the validity of the study. A lot has changed since the 1960’s. The 70’s were turbulent times. The 80’s had questionable taste in music and way too many pastel suits . The grunge movement in the 90’s would have hit those in their early 30’s pretty hard, not to mention a country pretty much at war ever since. There were plenty of environmental factors between then and now that could have effectively altered a personality. Then again, if the personality was set before those factors, then perhaps nothing was changed. So then back to my original inquiry, with that study in mind – what and when is a geek personality formed? If our children aren’t reading comics or programming their Mindstorms NXT toys to work with Arduino boards to control the light fixtures in their house or obsessively into Doctor Who by the end of Elementary School, is all hope lost? I don’t think it is. You see, while being a geek may embody certain personality traits I don’t think it itself is a personality trait. I think it’s more of a way of life, or perhaps an encompassing state of being. There are plenty of environmental and social factors that can change how one perceives and interprets life. There are always paths for new interests, new roads into the convoluted and ADHD world of geekdom. So there is plenty of time for your budding geeklet to morph into his eventual place in the world of geek. There is also just as much time for that same geeklet to put the way of the geek behind him. No matter what, our support as parents will make them successful no matter which path they choose, no matter what piques their interests. Just to round out the interactivity here at GeekDad, I posed the question to the Twitter/Facebook masses, “do you think your personality was set when you were 7? Why? Why not? Also, were you a geek and still are?” Here are some of those responses, feel free to add to them in the comments. “I think my core personality was in place. It took some time to get to the level of disfunctionality I have now. Yes I was a geek.” – @dgiancaspro “Set at 6 with first Dr. Strange comic. Yes, a geek… or at least geek-curious.” – @luckyradish “Read sci fi then and now. Was socially awkward back then, but now not as much Hubby agrees, same as he was at 7 – software engineer, blowing up LEDs, programming basic and all those other sciency techy kits. Kid and engineer at heart ” – @krissy314 “No, I don’t think it was, at least not in all aspects. But I think it wasn’t too long after that that it was.” – @cerebus19 (GeekDad Assistant Editor Matt Blum, who is clearly now a geek.) Follow us on Twitter @cebsilver and @wiredgeekdad . Story Image: C. Silver Homepage image: John C Abell
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