How You Can Make Your Precious Baby the Ultimate Winner at Life.

Your complete self-help guide to parenting the perfect capitalist sociopath in the digital age

The future is uncertain. Success is complex. How do we know we’re doing the right thing? We don’t. Societal messages are confusing at the best of times. Into this mix, I’d like to present a handy step-by-step guide to bringing up the perfect capitalist wonderkid.

Take all the following advice at your peril. These are the people entrusted with picking your nursing home after all.

Parenting in the digital age

Early Infancy (0–3)

Spend as much time on your phone as possible. From the moment they’re born babies attempt to interact and elicit care from adults. Any time your baby needs comfort, ensure that you’re busy checking your social media. This is vital.

Try and be as absent or as inconsistent as possible. Ensure that your child needs to compete for your attention. Make them work to draw your eyes away from that little blinking screen. That fierce competition will come in handy later on.

If you can maintain a complete emotional absence, your child will stop crying. Eventually. That’s a given. Once they learn it doesn’t work as a survival strategy they’ll shut the hell up. They’ll start to self soothe and learn they can regulate their emotions themselves.

When they turn into adults that might mean drink, drugs, porn or work addiction. But don’t you worry about that. You’ve seen ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ and high functioning alcoholics are a right laugh. The banking industry is rife with cocaine. Steve Jobs was all kinds of mentally healthy. These are your blueprints.

If you can maintain emotional unpredictability then they won’t learn to self soothe. They learn to act out and become the centre of attention. They’ll become wild, unpredictable and bratty. It’ll be hard at first, and you‘ll tire many times as they throw increasingly wild behaviours at you.

They may have emotional problems, toxic relationships, violent tendencies, and self-esteem issues. But at least they’ll win Big Brother Series 54. Or they’ll have their own Youtube channel and be a huge success as an influencer. This is the blueprint for a career as a successful influencer and media persona.

All thanks to you. But read on. There’s a lot more work to do yet.

Early Childhood (3–6)

Congrats. Your child can now walk and talk. Now is the time to start interfering with their play as much as possible.

Helicopter their early education experience like your life depends on it. If it looks like another child hasn’t quite learned to share yet, swoop in like the avenging spirit of Lenin and re-distribute the toys. Ensure your baby gets what they want.

Play is how young children learn that other people have needs and feelings. Play is how young human beings learn to cooperate. How they practice fairness and diplomacy. This is wholly unnecessary in a capitalist society. Interfering at this crucial stage will help set a wonderful precedent.

If you’ve got a boy, reward any behaviour that results in them getting exactly what they want. Do not reward any form of emotional intelligence. If they show signs of understanding the emotional needs of others, shut the convo down. Walk off. They’ll learn this is a bad thing fast. Real men are men. Big boys don’t cry. If someone hits you, hit them back. Oh, and don’t hit girls. That should foster an entirely confused sense of self.

This lack of emotional understanding will see them thrown into management very fast. Companies need people who can make difficult decisions fast. And by ‘difficult decisions’ they mean choices that hurt people. Get this right, and you might have a funky little sociopath on your hands.

Don’t revel in the tantrums just yet. There’s a crucial stage coming up.

Middle Childhood (7–11)

Now is the time to start indulging your child. If they want something, buy it for them. Get Amazon Prime. If Monday morning they have a desire for a PlayStation, have it delivered the next day. Other children might be learning how to delay gratification around this age. Yours doesn’t need to.

You can circumvent the need for waiting with ease. Buy anything they want. When Christmas rolls around turn Santa into an excuse for massive gift-gasm. Lay the presents out. If you can still see floor then either your house is too small or you didn’t buy enough. Adjust appropriately.

If you get this right, they will turn into adults who impulse buy. If they want something, they’ll buy it. Credit cards, payday loans, whatever it takes. There will be no ability to differentiate between wanting something and having it. This is vital work and you should prioritise it.

They might get into debt but that’s how economies flourish. Heaven forfend you’ve given birth to a socialist. The acquisition of stuff will become their primary life goal. They’ll work hard in a job they don’t enjoy so they can get the latest gadget, a nice car. Everything can be upgraded and people invariably upgrade themselves to the breadline.

Under no circumstances put in a pocket money system. That’ll teach them to budget, to wait for what they want, and to buy it only when they can afford it. Don’t do that. That’ll only cause fiscal stability in later life. Who wants that? Not bankers. Not governments. Not you.

Remember: Capitalism doesn’t welcome careful spenders.

Early Teens (12–14)

Give them unfettered access to the internet. Don’t put any parental controls in. Let them access the fantasy worlds of pornography and reality TV with reckless abandon.

Let them pick role models from Instagram. Find beautiful people with sponsorship deals. See if you can point them towards influencers who bitch and fight with each other. Got a girl? Find them a role model who straddles the line between influencer and softcore pornstar. The Kardashians have been doing this for years.

Early teens are very impressionable. Now is the perfect time to make the link between attractiveness and social status. They’ll buy more clothes and more make up. The longer they stay in this bubble of non-reality the better. They’re exposed to an imaginary life they can’t have. This is exactly right. Buy girls plenty of glossy gossip magazines. Continue to praise your boys for talking and thinking about young girls as objects.

Your job at this stage is to grow them into self-obsession. Create a vacuum where their personality should be. Then encourage them to fill this gap with branded merchandise. If they shun this lifestyle choice and start doing well at school, don’t panic. Give them unsupervised access to social media. They’ll get those messages from their friends too. You can have a well earned day off.

Mid Teens (14–17)

They’re now sleep deprived because of the social media. That shouldn’t matter though. Some of them will start entertaining the idea of becoming an ‘influencer’. Get them to fixate on themselves and their own existence.

Want an advanced tip? See if you can get your child to view their existence through the lens of society and their friends. Don’t let them think about themselves as having a separate identity from others. Reinforce the idea that everything they do and have is being judged. Then refuse to buy them new shoes.

This will crush whatever self-esteem they’ve been storing away. Don’t panic if they start getting into drugs or eating disorders. This is all good fodder for later autobiographies and tell-all videos on Youtube. There’s a market for poor mental health at the moment and it can be easily monetised. Misery porn will be all the rage in 2030.

If you’ve got a competitive teen, push them towards Fortnite. This game allows them to execute each other using a selection of weapons until only one of them remains. That’s a perfect metaphor for what Capitalism is all about. Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll is turning in its grave. Or box. Or storage cupboard. But don’t you worry about that. Competition. Competition. Competition. I told you that early insecurity with the mobile phone would be useful.

At this stage, it’s very important to tell them they can be anything they want to be. Ignore all evidence to the contrary.

Build false hopes for the future which match their plummeting self esteem.

Late Teens (18–20)

Once they’ve finished college flip-flop from saying ‘you can be whatever you want to be’ to ‘get a job’. Do this overnight. Make them believe they’re ready to carve out a niche in the universe. Then jam them unceremoniously into an existing hole. Something they’re unsuited for. Something they’ll seethe about after a few months of unhappiness.

Put continual pressure on them to sort themselves out. Don’t buy them anything anymore. This is make or break them.

Many will break and run off to therapy. They weren’t worth the effort and demonstrate why you should always have a few children. Put them on anti-depressants as soon as you can. GSK and other pharma companies are important to an evolving economy.

What will I get from following this wonderful guide?

Congrats. You now have adult children who hate their jobs and who don’t have the emotional resilience for life. They may hate you, they probably won’t. They have become people who attempt to fill their emotional void by the simple acquisition of anything. They might not be happy but the capitalist state doesn’t need happy people, it needs spenders.

Any time it looks like they’re moving towards happiness they’ll buy something else. Sometimes they’ll go on a big holiday with the purpose of showing it off on Instagram. Their house will never be good enough and constantly need redecorating.

Marriages might look good on the surface but lack any real emotional connection. It’s all about following Divorces, plural. Their own children will be dysfunctional too. An uncaring society devoid of people who can’t converse about anything other than themselves and the banality of their lives.

Over time we will have social media outrage about nothing. Reality TV about the super-rich as aspiration porn. CEOs of multinational companies with drinking problems. Bankers with heavy drug addictions. An uncaring political elite. A mental health crisis in our young people. A shortage of teachers, doctors and a jobs market full of influencers and social media specialists.

In short, a barely functioning society that believes success and wealth are the same thing. If this isn’t what you want for your children, I’d highly recommend doing the opposite of everything suggested above.