There are five or six blog posts rattling around in my head (about everything from vaccines and autism to an opposite-of-mean-girls story) and I’m itching to sit down and write them. But when I got 30 minutes to myself today (thank you, Sleepy Bunny!) I knew I had to write about the book my husband and I are reading. It’s called Bringing Up Geeks, by Marybeth Hicks, and we’re hooked.

I don’t know much about Hicks other than what her online bio says about her: She worked for the Reagan White House, she writes a parenting column for The Washington Post, she’s a morning show personality on Catholic talk radio. As far as I know, she has no background in child development or psychology.

What she does have, however, is a very cool message: Parents should strive to raise their children to be geeks. That’s right, geeks. She’s not advocating creating social misfits, mind you. She embraces a positive definition of the word “geek”—in fact, she creates a handy acronym: Genuine, Enthusiastic, Empowered Kids– and is proud to call her children geeks.

The basis of Hicks’ argument is that “cool”—ahh, there it is, that word again—isn’t always cool. That popularity isn’t always a good thing. Specifically, that striving to be popular drives children to blind conformity to consumerist, materialistic thinking, a too-early start to adult behaviors, and a devaluing of their authentic selves. These are ideas that are supported, albeit sometimes indirectly, by empirical research in multiple fields (I discuss some of that research here and here).

So what’s a parent to do? How do we teach our children to pursue what’s good, rather than what’s cool (to paraphrase Hicks herself)? My husband and I can spend hours talking about our desire for our daughter to choose family night over a night at the mall, to ask for a chemistry set for Christmas instead of a Bratz Doll. Thankfully, Hicks suggests 10 rules for raising geeks and includes practical advice for each, including a call to raise our children as brainiacs (#1), kids adults would like (#4), and late bloomers (#5). As a former late-blooming brainiac kid that adults seemed to like (most of the time, anyway), I say “Right on!” I was definitely a geek, and it served me well.

I don’t agree with all of the details of Hicks’s parenting philosophy—what two parents agree on everything about parenting? It’s also hard for me to imagine how parents of older children or adolescents who are already immersed in the culture of cool might use the book’s suggestions. Conversations with my very-cool teenage niece suggest that once the values are established, changing them is well nigh impossible. But Hicks’s book offers parents like me, those of us who want to protect our kids’ childhoods and keep them safe from the materialism, cynicism and hypermaturity of mainstream youth culture, a welcome measure of support that our hopes for our children aren’t unrealistic.