Posted on 09/01/2015 2:40:18 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Last night, I told my kids, "Make sure you have an outfit picked out for the first day of school, so it will be easy to get ready on time!" This morning, I discovered that they heard me say, "Make sure you have an outfit picked out mentally, so we can spend the first morning frantically tearing through mountains of laundry in the hopes that your My Little Pony tank somehow miraculously found its way into a basket."
This is just the little kids, who more or less want to look like all their friends. I do have teenagers, too, and they are all deep into inventing their own styles. Yesterday on Connecting the Dots, a caller asked me and Mark Shea how to navigate kids' style choices, especially when they want to look weird. Naturally, kids have to follow the school's dress code, and they can't be immodest. (I tell them: You are a person, not an object. Dress so that it's easy for people to tell you're a person, not an object.) Beyond that, here are the general principles we follow:
1. Avoid anything permanent. When one of the kids thinks that a tattoo or a piercing might be kind of awesome, I ask them, "Hey, remember when you were really, really into Animorphs?" And they wince and grimace. "Okay," I say. "But at the time, you thought they were great, right? But now you think they're stupid. There's a lot of things like that: they seemed really awesome just a short time ago, but then your idea of awesome changed. This is going to keep happening for a while as youre growing up, so we're not going to do anything that it would be hard to undo."
It doesn't hurt that my husband spends a lot of
(Excerpt) Read more at ncregister.com ...
I made it quite clear to my kids, that nobody with a tattoo or body piercing is going to live under my roof.
Maybe it’s the clothes she wears, or the way she combs her hair.
I was thinking of the little girl who wore her princess costume for 14 months every day.
BUMP
good for you!
do not let them emulate freaks like Mylie Cyrus
Hah, with the help of Sydney Poitier and Leonard Malton.
I guess Laz and his Prince Albert won’t be joining you for brunch anytime soon.
Dressing like a weirdo (barring anything illegal or permanent, as the author says) is a low-cost learning experience.
If someone pulled a stunt like that on me they would learn the meaning of regret. And sooner, not later.
Hurray for you! My 18 y.o. granddaughter has been dressing goth/punk/grunge since she turned 16. Whacko hair-do and makeup, gauged ear lobes, nose piercings, etc. Her mother (my daughter), a single mom, thinks all of this “self-expression” is “ok”. I TOTALLY disagree. My GD is a good kid, but this style attracts the wrong kind of attention and some not so good kids with the same look. Can’t take either one of them anywhere.
I was like 13 and my mom wanted my hair cut. Crap like that didn’t happen when I got older though.
Some good advice in there.
I told my son I’d slap him into the next millennium if he came home with piercings and tattoos.
He was pissed!(because he already knew better)
Your Mom’s boyfriend should have woken up dead one morning....
I guess I was about 9-10 (1974) when I asked mom if I could let my hair grow.
She said, “As long as you keep it clean, I hate greasy hair”.
Well I was off to the races. From that point on they never really said much about my appearance other than my Dad’s obligatory “Boy, get a haircut”.
My look in High School was much more Judd Nelson in the “Breakfast Club” several years before the movie came out.
Since I paid for my own garb from 15, I spent a lot of money in Thrift stores.
Mom was always cool about it, and would occasionally shake her head jokingly, and laugh a little.
She knew she had raised a “unique” kid.
I could tell you stories...
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