Parenting & Family Quote by Kenny Loggins

Loggins is doing something quietly radical here: he’s rehabilitating the “geek” as an emotional inheritance worth passing down. In a culture that taught a lot of Boomers to sand off their odd edges for approval, “my geek” reads like reclaimed property. The phrasing matters. He doesn’t say he tolerated that part of himself, or even accepted it; he “love[s] and appreciate[s] him,” turning an old slur into a term of affection. It’s a small linguistic pivot that signals a bigger psychological one: the inner critic gets replaced by an inner ally.

The subtext is parental. Self-concept isn’t a private hobby when you have kids; it’s an atmosphere. Loggins implies that children don’t primarily learn self-love from pep talks, but from watching what their parent permits in themselves. If he’s still at war with his own “geek,” the kids inherit the logic of shame: be acceptable, be normal, be less. When he honors that supposedly awkward, uncool part as “some of the best parts of me,” he breaks the chain. “Set my children free” isn’t melodrama; it’s an argument about transmission. Families pass down scripts as efficiently as they pass down eye color.

Contextually, it lands in a post-revenge-of-the-nerds era where “geek” has cultural cachet, but the childhood wounds are still real. Loggins uses his pop elder credibility to say: the liberation isn’t becoming cool. It’s making peace with what never needed fixing.