"Respect Yourself" is the title of a song that Bruce Willis recorded in the 80s. It is also a fitting summary of the message contained in his film "The Kid" from 2001: to be a complete person, you have to be able to respect yourself, as you were in the past and as what you may become in the future.

The film has been criticized for its traditionalist socio-political message meshed with trivial quasi-psychology. One of its most caustic critics simply dismisses the whole film as a vehicle for Willis' reactionary Republican world view.
An interesting point is that the critic in question is Swedish. Quite possibly his cultural prejudice may have lead him to over-interpret certain details to yield a much more sinister political meaning than the filmmakers intended.

That's entertainment
Admittedly, "The Kid" is in no way a revolutionary film. The protagonist Russ, a career-fixated jerk, when reformed, doesn't go away to work in an alfabetization project for children in rural Nicaragua, nor does he donate his money to Greenpeace. Russ is simply an upper-middle-class man who eventually manages to find a way towards a better the balance in his personal life, and uses some of his wealth to make this improvement a reality.
Admittedly, neither does the film's visual language do anything to challenge the viewer's perceptions. "The Kid" is populated by well-groomed, good-looking, healthy, expensively dressed men and women, and the general visual style is a cross between a sitcom and an Evian commercial. But this only makes it typical of entertainment movies of its decade. The same visual language and socio-political setting prevails in a vast majority of movies, from romantic comedies to action flicks, wherever the goal is to provide an unobtrusive setting for a more-or-less entertaining plot. Of course, unobtrusiveness can be construed as reactionary in and by itself, but the political message in "The Kid" can hardly be said to be more pronounced or intentional than in, say, "The Runaway Bride" or "What Lies Beneath". So why attack "The Kid" in particular?

Villa-Volvo-wooffy
No matter how globalized (i.e. Americanized) a country may be, its language still carries expressions of local culture-specific values and prejudices. In Swedish, one of the favorite ways of deriding "square" materialistic middle-class ideals in the 70s was to call them the "villa-Volvo-wooffy" values. The formula aims at characterizing the solid, stolid, money-grubbing, career-chasing, politically ignorant male chauvinist by his posessions:
The "villa", in this sense, is no extravagant luxury property: the word simply refers to a house of one's own, as opposed to an appartment or a commune.
The "Volvo" is, in Sweden, the solid, domestic, safety-conscious choice, with none of the extravagant and slightly decadent connotations that the brand name may carry in the US.
The "wooffy" or dog, finally, is the established house-owner's pet of choice. Having a dog requires a steady, routine existence, it prevents adventurous trips abroad, where you can't take a dog because of quarantine regulations, and it is the very symbol of mindless obedience of His Master's Voice. The corollary is that the dog-owner aspires to "own", train and control his wife and children in exactly the same way he controls his dog.
With this ideological baggage in his cultural background, small wonder that a critic dismisses "The Kid" as a piece of right-wing propaganda.

What's in a dog
So what else is in a dog? All of us who remember being eight years old and desperately longing for a pet we were forbidden to have, interpret the notion of dog in a totally different way. Many of us can recall hearing our parents say: "A dog or a cat is dirty, they run about and put their paws and noses in all sorts of places, and an animal doesn't belong in a house anyway!" To us, a pet in general and a dog in particular is a symbol of freedom, a companion in adventure. What more, to a lonely child a dog is the total friend: a being to love and be loved by in return, unconditionally, no matter whether or not we get good grades at school, finish our soup, or look and behave like everybody else. This is the true significance of dogs in "The Kid". We meet Chester the dog in most of the scenes where Russ sees his healthy future self. It makes perfect sense: to a child who can't have a pet, having one is the most desirable thing in the universe, and what good is growing up if you quit caring about the really important stuff???

There is more: in one of "The Kid"'s crucial scenes we see Rusty fight some bullies who abuse a three-legged dog. Rusty gives proof of his commitment and his empathy with, literally, the underdog - not because he wants Tripod for himself, to make a pet of, but because he defends the dog's right to live its own life. He shows true solidarity in a way that ought to be impossible in a film whose ideology is claimed to be the exact opposite. But empathy and solidarity are precisely the traits the film tells us that Russ the jerk needs to rediscover.

So, in more than one way, the dog represents the aspects of Rusty that Russ needs to reassert in order to become an emotionally healthy person. The dog-owning Russ isn't ashamed of the kid in him anymore. He has developed, from thinking that his eight-year-old self was embarrassing and best forgotten, to remembering and enjoying the inquisitive, empathic, playful, humane side of himself: in short, he has learned to respect himself.

And in general, imagining what one's eight- or ten-year-old self would say about one's present life is a really enlightening exercise - one that even film critics would do well to use occasionally. Try it someday!