Every morning my four-year-old daughter, Sydney, drags a chair into her closet and plucks a dress off of the rack. I try to lean her in other directions —“Why don’t we try shorts today?”—but Sydney’s stubborn. And I think she deserves the freedom to choose what she wants to wear.
“I hate you, dad!” Asher shouted to me in the kitchen, storming out for dramatic effect. My son was angry. He was having an existential crisis, where he couldn’t make sense of his place in the world, how and when we die, and what it all means.