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I t’s a simple a fact of life. No matter who you are or what you do, there will come a time when your child will look you in the eyes and say “You are such a loser.”

Okay, maybe loser is a little harsh a word. Perhaps dork or nerd is more appropriate. Whichever term they eventually choose, the meaning behind it will be pretty obvious -- you are an embarrassment to them. In most cases, this shift in the parent-child dynamic usually doesn’t happen until some time in the teenage years. No socially awkward kid wants to be picked up from school by a slightly balding dad whose beer-belly is poking out from under his T-shirt and who wears black socks with sandals.

“Oh no, that’s not my dad. I’m an orphan.”

It’s a sudden and inevitable change, and I’m afraid that my son is going to come to the awful conclusion about Dad’s lame-osity much much sooner than expected. Like, as soon as he can talk. I know I’m a nerd, and while I'm fine with that, it’s only a matter of time before my son catches on and I will be forever a nerd in his eyes.

It started to dawn on me early on, when I was cradling Jack in my arms and trying to coax him to sleep one night. I started off with my shaky rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” a good old chestnut that my lovely wife likes to use at bedtime. Trouble is, when I got to the end of the first verse, I realized that I didn’t know any other words to the song.

Okay, I thought, I’ll just move on to a different bedtime standard, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Again, I started off strong but quickly drifted off into a string of freestyle lyrics that made absolutely no sense. I knew that the baby couldn’t really understand the words that I was mumbling in that Beck-like fashion, but that’s not the point. I felt like I was cheating him out of some important childhood ritual. I had to sing him something all the way through.

I gave “Rock-a-Bye Baby” a try and while I had no trouble remembering the lyrics, I wish I didn’t, because it’s a very catchy song about a baby falling to its death. Nice. Maybe a few verses of “Mack the Knife” or “Stagger Lee,” next?

It was obvious that I didn’t really know any nursery rhymes or lullabies to save my life. Jack was not going to sleep and he needed a song to send him there. I looked in my mental jukebox and sang the first thing that popped into my mind.

“Well the world don’t move/ To the beat of just one drum/

What might be right for you/ Might not be right for some…”

Diff’rent Strokes. I sang my precious first-born child to sleep with the theme song to Diff’rent Strokes.

I know you’re thinking: “Whatchu talkin' about, Willis?” But it’s a perfect song to sing to a baby. It’s got a catchy melody, a very positive message about tolerance and acceptance and I bet that you could probably remember every single word of it. Aside from a particularly difficult high note in the line “a man is born,” it’s also very easy to sing and lends itself nicely to various tempos. That’s no mean feat for a song that just shy of a minute long and written by Alan Thicke.

The next song that came to mind started out, “You take the good/ You take the bad / You take ’em both / And then you have / The Facts of Life!” Another catchy song with a strong message about determination and perseverance in a difficult world. Thank you once more, Alan Thicke, for teaching my baby such important life lessons.

I soon discovered that almost every 80s sitcom theme song made an ideal lullaby -- One Day at a Time, Growing Pains, The Jeffersons. They all came flooding back to me, very catchy, very easy to sing and, more often than not, written by Alan Thicke. And as I relived my 80s sitcom past, Jack started to suck his thumb and drift off to a blissful sleep. It worked perfectly and my nerdy ability to recall the theme songs to long cancelled TV shows had finally found a real-life application.

A couple of nights later, Jack screamed and squirmed and refused to touch his last bottle before bedtime. I thought that maybe some story time would help to calm him down, but it became obvious a few pages in that he preferred trying to jam the book into his mouth rather than listen to a nice story. After a few minutes of wrestling with the book and the baby, I put the book down and decided to draw on my generation’s rich cultural traditions and simply tell him a bedtime story.

I took a deep breath and started spinning the first yarn that came to mind. Most parents would probably lead off with a classic like the Three Little Pigs or Humpty Dumpty. None of those time-honoured fairy tales even occurred to me. Instead, I opened my mouth and said, “Once upon a time, there was a boy named Peter Parker...”

Yes, my son's first fairy tale was the origin of the Amazing Spider-Man.

I proceeded to tell him the story of how Peter Parker, a bright but shy science student who one day took a field trip to a museum, where he was accidentally bitten by a radioactive spider, and how that spider bite gave him the proportionate abilities of a spider and how it took a terrible tragedy to teach him that with great power came great responsibility. Then he put on red and blue pajamas and fought crime.

The thing is, he loved it. He listened intently, with wide open eyes. He opened his mouth for his bottle and proceeded to calmly drink the entire thing. He sat quietly through a second story, about four scientists who flew a rocket ship through a cosmic storm and who returned to Earth with incredible powers and who dubbed themselves the Fantastic Four. Again, another big hit. I thought about the thousands of comic books I've read in my life and realized I had potential bedtime stories for years to come!

It’s okay for the time being to pump my son’s brain full of TV theme songs and comic book plots because he doesn't really English, but what happens a few years from now, when somewhere, somehow, like some Manchurian Candidate, he suddenly starts to spout the lyrics to Green Acres and can name all the members of the Legion of Superheroes? If he chooses to go down the path of the nerdy, then all my hard work will pay off, but if he instead chooses rather to seek out acceptance in the normal world, he may come looking for payback.

I suppose for time being I've got to go with what works. If sitcom theme songs calm his crying and bedtime stories based on old episodes of Star Trek help him sleep, well then, beam me up Scotty. If he grows up to be a well-adjusted kid who prefers road hockey with his friends to comic book conventions with his old man, then so be it, as long as he accepts nerds for what they really are – Not Even Remotely Dorky – and that it takes Diff'rent Strokes to move the world, and that's just the Facts of Life.