ALL DOLLED UP
Do you think kids are dressing appropriately nowadays or a bit too provocatively?
An online group thinks they definitely need to cover up more and is taking aim at retailers who target them. Mumsnet makes a few good points in its “Let Girls Be Girls” campaign. They say, among other things, that short shorts and t-shirts with questionable wording introduce girls to a sexualized world too soon while we as parents are busy trying to teach them to resist the pressure to become sexually active at a young age.
Are they onto something? Take Suri Cruise, for example. Rarely does a day go by where the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes is not photographed dressed to the nines in sundresses and glittery shoes with kitten heels. But come on now. Is Suri trying to be sexy? I doubt it. She’s three. It’s all about the pretty in her world.
When Good Enough Mother was a kid, one of my favorite memories was playing dress-up. My own good enough mother had a trick. She would go to yard sales and buy all the fancy dresses and shoes for like 5 bucks, and then store everything in a chest in the garage. On rainy days, we were dressed to the nines, with sequins, pointy-toed pumps, faux furs, you name it, we ran around in it. (Little known fact, when you wear the rubber heel off the bottom of the pump, if you run in the street, scraping said heel against the asphalt, sparks will fly up. Really. Double the excitement when the potential is there to trip on your too long dress or have a spark ignite it!) Like Suri, we just wanted to be pretty.
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