Nicknames can lead to identity crisis

My son, Braden, no longer calls me “Daddy.” He’s deemed it appropriate to call me “Scott,” like his mother, my wife Jenny, does.
Trying to teach him to call me “Daddy” again has not been easy. He hears Jenny call me “Scott” and then hears me reply to her. Using his 2-year-old logic, which technically is correct, he deduces that I’m Scott and that I will respond if he calls me Scott.
I do respond when he calls me Scott; I tell him that I’m Daddy and that he needs to refer to me as such.
“No, you’re Scott,” he responds.
“To you, I’m Daddy,” I argue, but it’s hard to argue with him, because I am Scott.
I have also been called Scotty; Beam Me Up Scotty; Scottie Too Hottie, after some professional wrestler, although I’d like to believe it’s because of stunning good looks; Steuck One, Steuck Two, Steuck Three, You’re Out; and the Steuck Monster, which is probably more appropriate than Scottie Too Hottie.
None of these nicknames actually shortens my name, which is usually the point of a nickname. Fortunately, none of these nicknames have actually been widely used in place of my name. All of them, except Scotty, were concocted by people I knew, but not that well, that were trying to be funny. These people continued to use the nickname until it wasn’t funny anymore. Interestingly enough, or maybe just by coincidence, I am no longer friends with the people that came up with these nicknames.
I’ve learned that the people that come up with nicknames are usually the people that like to draw attention to themselves. Getting people to laugh at their nicknames is something they take great pride in.
For example, the person that came up with Steuck One, Steuck Two, Steuck Three, You’re Out was in a gym class with me in high school. During our baseball unit, I swung at a pitch and missed. He quickly took my last name and substituted it for the word “strike,” which is similar to the pronunciation of my last name, although it doesn’t rhyme.
For the rest of the unit, anybody that swung and missed had a “Steuck One, Steuck Two, etc.” For those brief moments, when it was used, the person that came up with the nickname was a hero, and he loved it. Of course, people eventually forgot he came up with it, and the hero status transferred to me because it was my name.
I like to believe that the nickname guy is still out there trying to top that nickname and that his life won’t be fulfilled until he does. Good luck, I say.
I’m not one to usually call someone by a nickname, unless that is the person’s preferred name. But I do call one person by a nickname quite often – Braden. I call him “B-Rad,” pronounced Bee Rad.
I came up with this name when another friend asked if I had his “rap” name. My friends and I all have names for ourselves if we were rappers. I am Scotty Rock, mainly because it sounds kind of cool and because I prefer to rock out, not because I’m a brother to Kid Rock or anything.
So I came up with B-Rad for Braden, and I’ve called him that quite often, many times with my wife telling me to stop calling him that.
Braden didn’t mind, until he learned his full name was Braden Steuck. Now when I call him B-Rad, he says “Not B-Rad. I’m Braden Steuck.”
I argue with him and tell him “No, you’re B-Rad.”
I’m going to give the poor kid an identity crisis. At least he calls me by my real name, even if it’s not appropriate.