After catching up with this thread, it seems like the arguments against a boy wearing a dress are of the type:
It will cause him to have a less pleasant childhood, because of bullying
and arguments for are:
We should not weigh the effects of bullying in our consideration, because the other kids shouldn’t bully him anyway.
If wearing a dress would cause the child net less happiness, would people that are against be for it? If not wearing a dress would cause the child less happiness, would the people for it be against?
Secondarily is there anyone here that thinks the child’s parents should let him do it, or stop him from doing it for reasons that aren’t based on his happiness?
[quote]lnname wrote:
After catching up with this thread, it seems like the arguments against a boy wearing a dress are of the type:
It will cause him to have a less pleasant childhood, because of bullying
and arguments for are:
We should not weigh the effects of bullying in our consideration, because the other kids shouldn’t bully him anyway.
If wearing a dress would cause the child net less happiness, would people that are against be for it? If not wearing a dress would cause the child less happiness, would the people for it be against?
Secondarily is there anyone here that thinks the child’s parents should let him do it, or stop him from doing it for reasons that aren’t based on his happiness?[/quote]
Well, there are parents like what happened in the whole balloon boy hoax.
And there are parents of child beauty pageant girls.
I imagine there’s the “I wanted a girl, but that didn’t happen, so I’ll just have to dress my boy up like one” parents.
And the “I really want my 15 minutes of fame” parents.
But I don’t think that any of those are good or advisable.
[quote]LoRez wrote:
I’m not a parent, far from there, but I think the degree of sheltering should really be a function of age.
Just like you no longer need to tell a 15yo to look both ways before crossing the street, you should no longer need to tell a 15yo to not wear a dress to school. By that point in time, they should have a much better model of the world than they did at 5yo, and understand cause and effect better.
I highly doubt an 8yo kid really has the capacity to separate “people make fun of me because they don’t like me” from “people make fun of me because of what I’m wearing”. And, if at 15, the kid decides to wear a dress, knowing in advance that he’ll probably get made fun of… then that’s a totally different thing.
But if he were my kid, it would probably come down to “when you’re 18, and no longer living under my roof, you can dress however you want”.[/quote]
This is more or less my stance. Also, my 5 year old has all sorts of ideas about how she should act/dress/etc, but she’s FIVE. I’m sure she’d love to go to school looking all sorts of ridiculous, but that’s part of our jobs as parents…we teach her societal norms, so she can grow up adjusted, and spend her time and energy focused on things that actually matter.
This story, to me, is nothing but blatant attention-seeking. There’s been plenty of times and places through history where men have worn skirt/dress variations, there’s nothing inherently girlish about wearing a dress vs pants. But it’s a cultural norm, and one that doesn’t hurt anybody. If people wanna try to stick it to the man or whatever by going against that for no real reason, I guess that’s up to them. Just a silly ordeal overall, in my eyes.