📿 Meet the Bad Guy

My aspiration for the new year

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We’ve just returned from visiting a portion of Adreanna’s family for the holidays. While we were there, my daughter picked up an old plastic figurine—a hunched figure in a red cap, blue sweater, and black boots, grimacing as he held a musket—and said, plainly, “This is a bad guy.”

To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time Ruby had labeled something—or someone—as “bad.” Adreanna was quick to reassure me that this is a normal developmental stage: toddlers sorting the world into neat categories. I trust her on this (she reads far more parenting blogs than I do), but I couldn’t help wondering: when do we outgrow that stage? When do we move on from dividing the world into “good” and “bad,” which—subjectively speaking—often just boils down to dividing the world into what we believe is “for me” and what is “against me?”

As we move into 2026 I have one simple collective hope and personal aspiration: