This is not to say that boys don’t care about their clothing…
But let’s face it; they don’t.
The parenting/clothing correlation to boys is “the guns and weapons” fight. The difference being, that, your boys will eventually stop wanting to shoot fake guns.
We hope.
But clothing and girls? Well, this fight goes on forever, doesn’t it? I can remember standing in dressing rooms with my mother, hot-faced with embarrassment and annoyance. Couldn’t she see that all I wanted was to look “cool?” Which essentially means, “like the other cool girls?”
My mom still critiques my clothing.
And the only reason I ever started working (at age14) was so I could buy the Guess Jeans my mother refused to buy me.
Mothers and daughters and clothing.
Now that I am mother of three girls, I am hearing myself say the things I never thought I would. You know, all those parent-y things.
“The clothes never looked this slutty when I was younger.”
“The sequins? On the bathing suits?”
“Why does a 4T shirt say, ‘I’m a flirt on it?’”
I recently chatted with a friend, who is also the mom of an 8 year old girl, and she reiterated my story.
“What do I do,” she sputtered, “about the inappropriate clothes? Our shopping trip was rife with tears, struggles, and arguing, and I worry for the struggles in the future. But some of these clothes she wants are too mature, too short, and too, just too much!”
The parent coach had answers and advice for her. The mother in me drew in a long breath and heaved the heavy sigh.
Even if you are a stripper, with a long and storied career on the pole, there seems to be a “trashy-clothing” threshold that is innate to almost every mother (toddlers and tiara moms are completely and utterly excluded).
It makes a mom shudder to watch their four year old become sexualized, and now with an eight year old? It’s getting worse. She is not simply cute any more; my daughter is becoming pretty. She has lost of all of the little “kid” about her, and her bikinis are starting to make me nervous.
Of course, she is only eight. She is only on the cusp of her body-awareness and I don’t want her to think about her body. Not at all. Not ever. But when I watch her playing on the beach in her tiny bottoms, I cringe a little.
People are going to start to look at her.
I don’t want to fight with her about her clothes. I don’t want to make her feel ashamed of, or embarrassed by, her cute, ballerina, figure. I don’t want to lay the responsibility of the guilt or the worry of leering and pervy men at her feet.
She will have body-awareness issues…she is a female. Isn’t it unavoidable? I just want to mitigate how truly crazy it can be.
So, I have a couple of nonnegotiable (there are a some pieces clothing I cannot even consider), but I cannot fight every battle. I cannot sacrifice my relationship with my child over an aesthetic or a fear of the future. I know my battles are based in fear about her getting older, and me forcing her to wear long skirts is not going to stop that.
But, oh the shorts. Can they cover her bottom? Just a tad more?
{{Sigh}}