“Mom, I can’t wear this,” my friend’s daughter wailed. “It just isn’t me. I look ugly. If I wear this I will have a terrible day all day.” Was this a hormonal teenager worrying about what to wear on the first day of school?
No, it was a five-year-old despairing about her outfit for a day at kindergarten.
The issue of clothes can be an explosively divisive one in the parent-child relationship. Every morning the same conversations are taking place all across the country. “Just wear this!” “What happened to all those cute dresses I bought you?” “I don’t care what the other kids at school are wearing, you are not going to wear that!” “I know it’s your favorite shirt, but it has holes in it!” “I don’t care if Wilson wears the same shirt every day with a basketball-sized hole in the armpit.”
There are many books published about fostering creativity in children. Parents love to inspire their children’s imaginations, and gloat over their creativity and artistic creations. The irony is that when children wish to express themselves through what they wear, heated battles may ensue. We value self-expression. We just don’t wish to see it manifested in hot pink polka-dotted leggings with a chartreuse tube top or a black Megadeath T-shirt.
Why is it so hard for us to let our children dress freely? Maybe because when they are born we have total control over what they wear. It can be hard to give that up. It can also be hard to hear our taste is less than awesome.
“I bought her $400 worth of darling clothes at Parisian. I had to return every bit of it,” laments one mother about her six-year-old daughter. “She told me the clothes just weren’t cool.”
Parents can feel that they are being judged by how their children look. I used to be embarrassed when my husband sometimes dressed my children on weekends to take them out to lunch. He had a talent for pulling out the clothes that were too small, and mixing them in interesting combinations—a navy and red jumper with a royal blue and white striped shirt. Pants that came up to my son’s shins. Plaid shorts and flowered shirts. I would fight to remain silent and remind myself that it was nice to have someone else dress them, and the important thing was that they were spending time together. My husband didn’t care, my children didn’t care, why should I?
Other parents have [foregone] the clothing battle. A mother in my parenting class said that her son wore a short-sleeved purple T-shirt every day for two years. One of the strangest attire stories I heard was about a couple in South Carolina whose son wore a mixing bowl on his head every day throughout preschool.
Every family will experience conflicts. One of the keys to cutting down on them is to determine your priorities and let other things pass. I figure that the issue of clothing is a battle I don’t need to fight. Letting my children wear what they want doesn’t hurt anybody, isn’t hazardous to their health as long as they are dressed warmly enough. My son wore his black fireman hat, black plastic fireman vest, and yellow rain boots every day for months. I liked it because it was easy to peel off half-eaten fruit snacks and wipe up spilled fruit punch.
I do have a few basic rules for my children: it has to be clean, they can’t be improperly exposed, and they have to wear nice clothes to church. I admit it is easy to say because I have a daughter who will basically still wear what I buy, and a son who rarely notices what he is wearing. But I know the day is coming when my daughter will probably wear faded jeans and baggy T-shirts, and do who-knows-what to her beautiful long hair. I hope when those days come that I can be accepting and maybe even admire her self-expression, whatever it may be.
When my son was in kindergarten, he decided it was a good idea to sleep in his clothes. So after his bath, he put on clean pants and a shirt. At first I protested, then realized that this was a good thing indeed! It was one less thing to do in the morning, as he woke up all ready to go, and as far as I’ve heard, a few wrinkles never interfered with the learning process.
A few years later, after collecting several T-shirts from his summer camp, he began wearing the same thing every day: khaki shorts and a summer camp T-shirt. Again, I had no complaints. I was in one of those dreaded communal dressing rooms recently. A woman was with her teenage daughter who was trying on pants. The mom told her that what she bought was up to her. Then she asked how her belly ring was doing. I saw in the mirror that the girl had a small silver hoop hanging off her navel. Now that is an accepting mom.
I was at church a few years ago on a cold day in February. There was a little girl on the playground wearing a shirt and pants, with a one-piece bathing suit on top of it. In this case it was hard to determine whether these were very accepting parents or just exasperated ones who said, ‘Okay, fine, wear your bathing suit to church. Just get in the car.”
It’s good to eliminate some battles because there will always be more important ones to follow. Like getting them into clothes at all. My daughter marched down the stairs this morning as we were frantically getting read for church, announcing loudly, “Christopher says he is not going to get dressed. He is in his room and says he is never coming out.”
An excerpt from Just a Stage, a book of parenting columns by Jan Butsch.