Why mature fashion and young children do not mix
Dressing kids like “little adults” tells more about the parents than anything else
Clothes with fun graphics and characters may be losing their traction with parents who want their kids to dress like adults. (Austin Kelly)
What was a piece of clothing you used to wear as a kid? Very likely it was something colourful — perhaps your favourite colour — with a design you thought looked “cool” at the time.
Off the top of my head, I can remember three stand-out articles of clothing from my childhood. A dark, short-sleeved button-down with Guy Fieri-esque flames and the Tasmanian Devil from the Looney Tunes on its back. A black t-shirt with a three-panel comic strip on the front featuring Homer Simpson building up to a cheap pun about doughnuts. And, finally, a pair of green corduroy overalls I was inordinately fond of all the way back in kindergarten.
These clothes were informal and had designs that popped and were interesting to some extent — typical clothes for a public elementary school student. My classmates were more or less the same way. Kids tend to like colourful clothing with designs printed or stitched on. Mom and Dad may have bought us more “respectful” looking stuff, but children like things that are bright and look silly to adults, yet are the coolest ever to kids.
Enter the conundrum — kids cannot be babied all the time. Parents cannot choose their kids’ clothes everyday forever. As time goes on, children increasingly want to assert their own agency into their lives, and resisting this too much can cause a lot of problems.
Understandably, parents might try to lean into this and permit their kids extra freedoms to teach responsibility or because the kids could actually handle the burden. However, children still have a lot of physical, intellectual, and emotional development ahead of them so there are certain things that are still beyond their scope.
One instance of this is when parents dress their children more maturely than most. I am not talking about allowing them to dress that way, but actively choosing their clothes for them. This entails dark or neutral colours and articles like mini-skirts, heels, dinner jackets, and a variety of accessories among others.
Dark or neutral colours and designs are not too much of an issue, not every piece of clothing can be a graphic tee or light-up sneakers. And kids wearing suits and ties is not uncommon if their school enforces uniforms or if it is a special occasion.
But children are not life-sized dolls for the parent to dress up however they please. The parentification of children is when a kid is forced to adopt adult responsibilities out of necessity, for example, when the actual parents fall short on cooking, cleaning, looking after younger siblings, and so on.
Parentification, especially when it happens earlier, leads to multiple mental and emotional challenges down the road as a result of the kid having been effectively robbed of a childhood. Dressing your kids like “little adults” could be considered “parentification-lite” if one so chooses to.
By ascribing adult fashion senses and styles onto children, the standard of what is “normal” to wear is set early on and pushes that notion into the kid. Considering how toxic beauty standards can get and the ensuing consequences thereof, this really is not the type of attitude that should be instilled in children.
Children need space to explore their interests and identities, even when it can be a great test of wills for parents and kids alike. Projecting your preferences onto your kids rarely ever goes well if it sticks at all. They will eventually mature in sense and in style and that is a test in and of itself called “the teenage years.”
Until then, let them muck up their Bluey shoes.
