Complete, utter piffle.

When our children make choices that will make their lives harder, we as parents have an obligation. When they reach a certain age, we can discuss it. "Honey, I know you don't care about wearing your pants backwards, but I worry that you'll be upset at the other kids' reactions." When they are younger and not able to make decisions for themselves, sometimes we have to make decisions for them.

I feel particularly strongly about this because I have a child with Asperger's syndrome. Unless I teach him about social expectations, he won't know what they are! I would be totally remiss as a parent if I didn't take it on myself to help him learn how to navigate the tortuous halls of social expectation.

He is acutely sensitive to being different than the other kids, but has no clue how to fit in unless I teach him.

I violated social norms as a child left and right...without understanding I was doing so, having no idea how NOT to, and being miserable at the results. I consider it a (understandable given our specific circumstances) failure on my parents' part for not giving me adequate instructions on social expectations.

$name_radacted's parent can take her own anonymous advice about what I "must never do" but I make my own parenting choices, no matter how stridently other people frame theirs.

I have an autistic child and two neurotypical children, all boys. We are a pretty nonconformist household and I've always been pretty laissez faire about what they wear (and many other things).

Your way of raising your children sounds reasonable. Mine are too. (coincidentally likely very similar but that isnot relevant). I won't tell you your choices are killing your children and that you doing it my way is "not negotiable" and I'd expect the same courtesy from you.

The poster above does not extend that courtesy. Instead she decides other people, contrary to their stated motives of caring for the child's social health, are really just repressing their children because they are embarrassed and uncomfortable.

And not only are we to take her approach as non negotiable, we are even forbidden from sympathizing with other parents who are "killing their children" as they try to imperfectly navigate the rocky shoals of parenthood in unapproved ways

I reject it all. How to help children, NT and spectrum alike, learn how and when to follow social expectations is complicated and open to many reasonable approaches. And happily, it is almost never the case that even if we fuck it up from time to time, that we will kill our children.

Hear, hear.

My son loves basketball and soccer and dinosaurs. He also loves math and imagination games. He also loves pink, and flowers. We think all these things are great about him. We don't give a damn which of them are generally considered boy things, neutral things, or girl things.

He's getting his sister's hand-me-down bicycle next spring. It's pink and purple and glittery and he loves it. :) So far, he's shown no interest in wearing anything particular except "stuff with DINOSAURS!!" But if and when he decides he would like to wear a dress, it will pass without a word around here. And if he comes home saying there was trouble at school about it, I will damn well have words with his school.

As a society, we've started to learn how to idiotic-tradition-proof our girls. (There are definitely areas of exception: girls start hearing about being fat as young as boys start hearing about wearing dresses, if they aren't whisker-slim.) We are a generation or so behind in learning how to idiot-tradition-proof our boys, and that means that the idea that it's necessary is just starting to cross the collective radar.

yargh. where to start?

there is "safe space" and there is "space we share with the idiots". safe space -- do what you will, and excelsior. space we share with the idiots -- learn the norms so that *if* you choose to violate them, you'll know what lines you're stepping across and how people are likely to react.

monkeys don't like it when there's a monkey that looks/acts different. they tend to fling poo (or rocks, or words). if you're ever going to live in monkey society, you need to learn how the society works, and decide how you want to fit in (or not fit in) to it.

that's reality. letting a boy wear a dress to school is pretty much branding him a wierdo from day one and opening him up to being taunted for being gay (whether or not he is!) as soon as some little bastard thinks of it. IMO that's child abuse.

This is a really interesting discussion and I don't know whose side I'm on, which is perhaps appropriate since I'm not a parent and know very little about raising children. Though I think dbang's point about hysteria and blame is well-taken; "you're killing children" is now added to my list of "things which, when said by anybody in an argument, should make you step back from the argument, breathe deeply for a moment, and reconsider."

But it does remind me of something a lot less high-stakes that I've thought about idly. I was a misfit when I was a kid, for most of the reasons that kids are ever misfits. It occurred to me a few years ago that my parents could have (if they'd had the inclination or the ability) done something to help with this if they hadn't dressed me so incredibly frumpily. As an adult I suppose it's part of my identity that I'm not very fashionable, because I never have been, and my mother isn't, and her sister isn't, and for better or worse those are my role models for what it means to be a woman. But dressing as the other kids were dressed would have been one thing, a very minor thing, that could have gone in my favor socially, when other things (chubby, glasses, bookish, weird vocab, socially strange) did not. Would it have made THE difference? I don't know. If it did, would I rather be that me than this one? I don't know that, either.

I guess another thing I want to say here is that maybe there isn't really a neutral when it comes to your role in how your kids establish their identity... and that's actually okay. My parents raised me frumpy and I basically stayed there. My parents raised me Catholic too, and leaving was a struggle for me internally, but I still did it and at 31 things are basically fine. We all gotta be born somewhere.

I find myself turning over very small pieces of this in my head and looking at them, without any kid-raising of my own.

* My sister does get in battles with her 4-year-old daughter about appropriate clothes - that tends to be about whether or not she can go outside when it is cold without jacket and shoes. I suspect that both sides feel just as strongly about their opinions here as were she a boy wanting to wear a dress.
* How is the three-year old getting dresses to wear? He must be too young to shop for himself, surely. Heck, two years old feels more like the "no, we do not wear our underwear on our heads" or at least "please do not raise your skirt above your head in public".

* Mostly, I think kids transition from having all their decisions made for them (most are not consulted about diapers) to having personalities and wanting to make their own decisions; in between, there is a lot of experimentation with bad decision-making (I do not want to take a nap! I don't want to do my homework!) and the parent should be allowing more autonomy as the kid gets older and wiser, but can't stop steering at the first expression of an opinion by the kid.

Oh. Yes.
Thank you.

I must say this, as mother of an 11 year old boy who has been carrying a "man purse" since he was 7 and has used his own money to buy a pretty ruby necklace for himself even though the saleswoman was horrified when she realized that he wasn't buying it for his mother. He has far more guts than I do. He faced her down and said, "Why are you being so sexist? It's a nice necklace."

And damned if he doesn't make that necklace look as manly as a utilikilt.

I'd like to insert a little reality into this conversation. Sounds like the OP has a girl and no boys...it's always easy to cast aspersions on parenting choices you yourself don't have to face.

So here are three real life examples of parents handling the gender norm question:

1) two of my three sons went through typical phases of wanting to dress "pretty"...not dresses specifically, but glitter and jewelry and flashy things that were definitely "girlish". In both cases, I wondered what, if anything, I should do. With the first, he had a pretty strong sense of self and was good at picking up social clues, so I let him have at, and figured that he would absorb gender norms from his peers without any help from me. And he did, and is now typically boyish about the subject ("Ew! That's for (blech) GIRLS!") The second was a different child -- less self assured and way less likely to pick up social cues. (He later turned out to be Aspie but I didn't know that then.) With him I thought about it a lot more. I never actively prohibited his choices but I did discourage them. Two different children, two different approaches to parenting similar issues.

2) A close friend with a 4 year old son went through a great deal of angst about this when her son got ahold of a couple dresses a neighbor gave him. He wanted to wear them 24x7. My friend and I discussed it at length on multiple occasions...first the question of whether she SHOULD intervene, and later the dreaded "killing" question of "how do I stop him?". She was concerned that he learn to fit in socially AND that he not be shamed for his choices. In the end, as I recall, she opted for the dresses to silently "disappear" without comment. That boy is now 11, and quite well adjusted, socially and otherwise.

3) Last week I was painting my toenails (every now and then I pretend I'm a real girl) when an 8 year old neighborhood boy asked if he, too, could have painted toenails. Knowing that at this time of year, his toes would not be visible at school, I let him. Then he asked if he could paint his fingers...clearly visible (and the color was quite clearly feminine). I didn't feel comfortable making that parenting choice for someone else's child, so I told him he needed his mom's permission before I would allow that. He talked to his mom, got her permission, and painted his fingernails. Had it been my child, I would not have allowed it; this particular child is having great struggles at school, including socially, and I would not have wanted in any way to add to his troubles. But I can live with parents making different choices than I would, so I didn't comment to her (unless she reads this) or him, and he happily turned his nails blood red.

In the real world with real life boys, these questions are not cut and dried, and in my experience most parents do their best, in the absence of an "owner's manual" for their child, to do the best they can in their child's and family's interest. It's quite easy to second guess someone's choices, and feel free to do that...IF and only if you yourself are a perfect parent.

There's a 10-year-old boy in my community who recently became curious about female clothing. He's been dressing up in a female friend's dresses, and his friend delights in playing make-up with him. Now, I should point a couple of things out: 1. This boy has, up until now, been a total, stereotypical boy. He plays baseball and hockey, he skateboards all over the place, and he's frenetically active. 2. I live in a cohousing community that's very liberal and accepting. We have several gay members, including the boy's mother (who incidentally NEVER wears dresses).

So responses to the boy's experimentation have ranged from "cool, you look lovely" to . What I told him was that I thought standards of dress are terribly unfair to little boys. It is perfectly acceptable for a girl to dress up like a boy, and completely unacceptable, in most places, for a boy to dress like a girl. That's an annoying double standard, and it seems overly restrictive to me.

In our common house, we have a children's playroom with a big dress-up bin full of costumes and clothes. All of the kids dress up in them all the time, but until last week, not one little boy had ever put on a dress. Did they never even think of it, or never have the nerve? I think it was incredibly creative for this boy to start trying on princess and ballerina dresses, just to see what it was like. And by reacting either positively or with indifference, his community has been supportive, allowing him to experiment now and better understand himself later in life.

So what happens if he decides to wear a dress to school one day? First, I doubt he would. I doubt this fad will last past Halloween. Most kids raised in cohousing are very context-sensitive (it's okay to run in the hall at home but not in the common house; you can't watch TV at home, but you can watch at a friend's house), so he probably already knows this would likely be a bad idea. Second, if he did decide to do it, his mother and other members of the community would contact the school and let them know ahead of time, smoothing the path. And third, if anyone gave him grief about it, this boy would probably wrestle them to the ground, dress or no dress.

Hmm... I think the theme here is self-confidence. If a child knows that he is supported and loved, and if the adults and peers in his life treat him honestly and fairly, regardless of what he likes to wear, then he'll have the self-confidence and self-awareness to cope. I'm not saying that it'll be easy, but I am saying that he'll be highly unlikely to jump off a bridge.

Now, here's the horrible thing.

As I sit here, writing this, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, "I've just put down enough information that any sufficiently motivated psycho can figure out who this kid is and target him. Should I really be posting this?"

Yes, dammit, I should.

I'm feeling really caught here, because on the one hand, if I talked to the people the OP was annoyed by, the odds are really good that I would also be annoyed and possibly worried for those people's kids. On the other hand, I think the OP is acting like the issue is way easier than it is.

WRT gender identity, I have two parenting decisions that I would label "not ok at all". One is to shame a kid for their gendered choices and tell them it's not ok to make that choice (assuming gender is the only issue). The other is, after the age of 3-4, to send them off to school or another not-known-to-be-safe space with a pat on the head and a "you look lovely" and no warning that other kids may react to it.

My older son was an adorably ambiguously-gendered toddler. We loved his hair long and so we didn't cut it. We dressed him mostly in boys clothes, but with the hair strangers always read him as a girl. He had purple shoes that he loved. To the best of my knowledge no one ever picked on him, but as he got older he got a little bothered by people thinking he was a girl. We kept it mellow, acknowledged the concern, talked about how the people were mistaken, no big deal. Next shoe-shopping (he was 4), when he went for the purple shoes, I told him he could totally have them but he should know that some people thought of purple as a girl's color. We spent ... an hour? two hours? a long time in the shoe store checking out every pair of kid's shoes. He wanted shoes that "counted" as boy and were also bright colored. It was really hard and I felt sad that the world sucked. I kinda wanted him to say "screw those folks" and get the purple shoes, but that wasn't my choice to make. Finally the sales clerk (bless them!) found shoes from Sweden that were bright red. Praise the lord and pass the herring!

Anyway, now I have an 8 year old who dresses like a boy, mostly dark colors but he loves him some tie-dye. He got his hair cut later that year, at 4, to stop people mistaking him for a girl. Side bonus turned into the main thing that having power over your own hair is awesome and radically changing your look really gets people's attention. For him, growing up has meant becoming more clearly gendered (though not perfectly, none of us are), just as the larger society wants. That's been sad for me, but for him, has been practically a non-issue. He's been lucky in many ways, but I like to think our parenting choices helped a little.

Thank you. :)