Most important thing you’ll do for your child is selecting other parent

By David McElroy · October 18, 2017

When I read today that 68-year-old singer Billy Joel and his 36-year-old wife are expecting their second child, my first thought was, “Well, there’s hope for me yet.”

I’ve known since I was a teen-ager that I wanted children of my own, but the time and situation have never been right for me to have kids. Although I’m certainly not as old as Joel, I’ve reached the point at which the clock is ticking. I have to get started if I’m going to.

But as I think about this again, I’m reminded of my problem. If I just wanted to reproduce with someone, I would be able to find someone and get started quickly. My problem is that I know the kind of mother I want for my children — and that woman is very hard to find and even harder to woo and win.

The cynical part of me says my real problem is that I’m not rich and famous the way Billy Joel is. If I had his fame and money, I would have my choice of women who want children and would also want me. But the most honest part of me says the cynical part is only half right. If I were rich and famous, there would be plenty of younger women who wanted to marry me, but I still would have trouble finding one who I would want, too.

It seems to me there is no greater compliment I can pay a woman than to be able to sincerely say, “I want to have children with you, because I think so highly of you that I want my children to be influenced by your genes and your character.”

The same goes just as much in reverse, too. I want a woman to love me enough — and to think highly enough of me — to want her children to be like me, as they would inevitably be because of genetics and my daily influence. I want a woman to want to spend time with me and to share life and love, but I can’t think of any greater honor than for the right woman to want me to be her partner as a parent — to want her children to be something like me.

When you choose the person who will be the other parent for your children, you are making the most important decision of their lives. You’re determining not only which things will influence a child — values, beliefs, habits, faults and so forth — but you’re actually determining what half of that child will be in the most fundamental, biological sense. Whether we like to admit it or not, far more of what a person becomes is in those genes than we would like.

I worry enough about making mistakes with my children and somehow damaging them without meaning to. I carry baggage with me from my past that I’ve spent many years thinking about and I’ve spent a lot of time in counseling to deal with the issues. I believe I’m finally ready to be the kind of father I need to be. I don’t know that I could have done such a good job 20 years ago.

I have no idea whether Billy Joel is a great father or not. I have no idea whether his wife, Alexis Roderick, is a great mother. She’s his fourth wife, so I hope he’s finally worked through his issues and found the right match. I can have no idea about their specifics.

Still, it makes me happy to see a man older than I am having children — this will be their second child since their wedding two years ago — and it gives me encouragement that maybe it’s still possible for me to have the family I want so much.

I’m not rich and famous the way Joel is, but I hope the right woman will want me for something more than money and fame anyway.

I hope the right woman — one who I want my children to emulate — will be able to want me as the father of her children. Nothing matters to me as much as this, but finding and winning this woman is completely outside of my control.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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