Children of Atlantis

It's considered unlucky to name a child after someone you knew who died of anything other than old age. The expedition is made up of scientists and marines and people to whom superstition is ridiculous, but there are some pieces of superstition which pop up despite this, which aren't even considered to be superstition by anybody who's been there for a while. The unluckiness of naming children after the deceased hasn't been doubted since the belief came into existence after the way Carson Parrish died the way he did.

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Most of the children are the result of various unexpected incidents, involving Ancient devices and/or time travel, both on Atlantis and offworld. On Atlantis, there isn't nearly as much assumption that a child's parents are romantically involved as there is on Earth, although some of the incidents are almost certainly "accidents" rather than actual accidents.

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The children are raised by the community. Everybody on Atlantis is too important to be a babysitter full-time, so different people take care of them depending on who has time off, or at least little enough urgent work that they can afford to be interrupted, and who's injured enough to be taking a break but not injured enough to be completely bedridden. The adults who are watching them often teach them whatever they know the most about. Their educations are varied and excellent and lumpy. They can more easily read a mission report than fiction, because there isn't enough literature for them to read a lot of it, and for the most part they learned to read from mission reports with cautionary tales because they need to know what to avoid.

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Everybody gets combat training. Everybody. They start learning as soon as they possibly can, starting with running and hiding and quickly moving up to what they can do if they're put in a position where they have to fight or die. As soon as they're old enough to understand the responsibility, they start training to shoot. They're responsible for their sidearms, and they're not allowed to remove them from the holster unless they're servicing them or a Code Red (invasion of the City) has been declared. They wear them at all times, as do all the adult Atlanteans. There have been too many people killed because they thought that just this once they could leave the weapon in their room and have a nice day off.

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The City has been invaded at least once a year since the expedition got there. In one year, it was invaded seven times. The children stay in the most defensible part of Atlantis when it's invaded, guarded by many people. That doesn't stop Taro Zelenka from having to put a bullet through a Genii's head during one of them. This was not the first time he'd had to kill somebody; the second time he'd been kidnapped his knife had gotten red from the blood of the kidnapper's throat. He was six at the time. The kidnapper had been about to kill his other victim, baby Jeannie.

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Prime/not prime is the most popular game among the children, hands down.

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The children are a secret from anybody on Earth. The SGC would undoubtedly force any children to come to Earth, despite them being Atlantis natives, because Pegasus is a warzone and their parents are from Earth. None of the Atlanteans want to return to Earth, and they don't want to lose their children either. Keeping the secret of the children leads to the possibility of keeping other secrets, and slowly the rules in Atlantis start to diverge from the rules on Earth. One of the unofficial mottoes (there are several, including "Yes it's pretty, but please don't touch") becomes "We do things a bit differently in the Pegasus Galaxy".

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Everybody has dog tags. The SGC only issues them for official members of the expedition, initially leaving Teyla and Ronon and the children without, but the people of a particular planet had been intrigued by the team's tags. Now they do a lucrative trade in personalized dog tags (the kids' are in English and the trade language; most of the ones they make for others are in either only the trade language or in both the trade language and the owner's native tongue), with the owner's name and gate address (in some cases, the gate address of people who know them but not home; the kids' have the Alpha site). The popularity of the dog tags is not due to the Wraith (when the Wraith take somebody with one of their ships, there's no body to retrieve the tags from), but because the Pegasus galaxy is a dangerous place even without them. There's enough dangerous flora and fauna and people for the dog tags to be desired even if much of the time there's no possibility of them being returned to family.