The Value of Telling Your Kids No

Even if it’s about something as silly as sweatpants.

This week, I did something so cruel, so monstrous, to my children that, to judge their reaction, they will someday be talking about it to their therapists as an obstacle from their youth that they, well into adulthood, valiantly struggle to overcome.

I refused to let them wear sweatpants to school.

This last week, it finally got below 60 degrees in Athens, Georgia — remember fall? It was a full three months of the year in which you could wear a light jacket and have an occasional dalliance with a gourd — which meant, for the first time since school started down here in early August, it was too cold for the middle schoolers who live in my house to wear shorts. So the little shits tried to sneak sweatpants by me.

I suppose I am not against sweatpants as a general concept, though the only place anyone should be allowed to wear them is on the couch and I’m not sure their general purpose would not be better served by a blanket, or maybe a fluffy dog. But that one would choose to wear them in public, a place where other people can see you, is baffling to me. So when both of my sons tried to put on sweatpants on Tuesday morning, I told them no. You have several pairs of jeans, a couple of which you haven’t even outgrown in the…