My son wants to eat his lunch in the shade.

It’s a reasonable request, sure, but he’s at summer camp and they have rules, one of them being that campers must always be in counselors’ eyesight, including during lunchtime.

As a parent who knows that kids don’t always warn you before they run off to follow a butterfly or an interesting noise or for any number of other random reasons, the rule makes sense.

But to a trustworthy 9-year-old, one who has no plans for desertion and who has never given them cause to think he’ll escape, it’s ridiculous.

“It’s so hot where they want us to sit,” he said to me, complaining about their rigidity. “We’re not going anywhere but under a tree.”

I get it, I do, but I also feel like this is about more than just where the kids eat lunch during summer camp. Call me Chicken Little if you like, but I worry we’ve created a society where people think they only need to follow the rules they want to follow — the ones they like, the ones they understand, the ones that make sense to them. And I’m doing my best to combat that in the next generation, by raising children who know that their obedience doesn’t require their agreement.

I’ve told my kids that there are plenty of rules I don’t want to follow but do. I don’t want to pay more property taxes every year, regardless of whether we’re benefitting from any theoretical increases in value. I don’t want to fork out more for groceries every month because manufacturers are hedging against some future potential tariff hit. I don’t want to get “pre-approval” from a health insurance company for treatments my doctor says are necessary.

I don’t want to stop at a stop sign when it’s late at night and anyone with two working eyes could see no one’s coming in the other direction.

But I do all of those things, and more, because there are certain freedoms that you give up when you live in a society, and one of those is the freedom to ignore any rule you find personally objectionable.

I’ve told my son that if the counselors were asking him to do something morally wrong — if they wanted him to lie or hurt someone, if they asked him to put himself in some kind of danger — then it would not just be his right, but his responsibility, to defy them. There’s a bit of a judgement call in there for someone who hasn’t yet even seen 10 turns around the sun, for I’m sure he finds it highly immoral that he’s required to sit in the sun when cool, leafy shade is nearby, but he’ll get there with time.

Who I’m really worried about are the children (and let’s be honest, increasingly the adults) who were never taught that lesson. I see plenty of parents cutting across waiting lines of cars to drop their kids off first (they, unlike the rest of us, are busy and have jobs to get to). I see innumerable folks walking dogs without leashes despite the law requiring one (their dogs never bite, growl, run away, cause fear, expel allergens or allow themselves to be bitten by other dogs). In fact, there is almost constant evidence that many of us think that rules were made only for other people — people who aren’t as special, different or important as they are.

I’m trying to create the opposite impression in my kids. They are special to their family, of course, but that doesn’t make them especially exempt.

Because rules, even the dumb ones, are important.