Show some Respect!

We were recently away camping, adventuring, and all round family bonding. Mid-walk along a jagged beach my son turned to me:

"You stupid bum head!" he yelled at me and stomped his feed over the fallen log.
He was mad at me; I could tell. He didn't usually resort to name calling, but clearly I had crossed over some amorphous line.

"You're treating me like a girl.... and not like a REAL man!" he snapped.

Now he was getting to the root of things. "But Finn," I tried, "you are five years old and we're your parents. We have a right to not have our son unnecessarily dashed onto the rocks, just because he wants to walk across the fallen log, ten some feet about a pile of craggy rocks,” I tell him.

But he's having none of it. "But, I am a man." He insists.
We cajole his desire for manhood and settle on little young-man, one who still sits on his daddy's lap to have his teeth brushed.

Chloe scowled at him, from the other end of the log--where she'd just walked unaided; that would make her our eight-year-old young woman... but she didn't insist.

the saga continues
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