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I don’t know the answer.
I feel like I didn’t get it quite right with Pikelet. I think our intentions were good and we do have photos of her in a wide range of styles of clothing, so hopefully she can see herself in her baby pictures. We have given her a reasonable amount of say in how she presents herself now too, while keeping sun safety and practicality in mind because she would wear sleeveless floor length gowns to climb trees if given free range…
I’m really not comfortable in how much I avoided the more feminine clothing choices for her though, and how I had been talking those choices down when she showed an initial preference. I feel like that has exposed something about my own internalised misogyny that I am really not comfortable with and don’t know if I am ready to to unpack and face.
What do we do with Waffles? I like to say “clothes are for people” but I did pack up Pikelet’s dresses when we found out he was a boy, so do I really believe that? Dresses are for no one doesn’t seem like an ideal alternative. I just don’t know 
. I don’t want my kid being bullied or to resent us later and that is a real fear I have, maybe irrational but based on my own experiences of school and is school much different now?
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My kid had a preference for super colorful leggings and loose simple dresses as a little little kid because the dress length tops were warmer when they weren’t exposing skin in the winter and leggings are just hella easier to move around in. Before he started kindy we just started having conversations about how “kids at school are told what to wear by Target and Kmart, and Target and Kmart say girls can only wear these clothes and boys can only wear these clothes but you know you can wear whatever you want. but some kids might not know that and they might think that it’s a rule that they have to wear the clothes that Target says are boy clothes and girl clothes, so they might try to tell you that those are rules that you have to follow and it’s up to you-- if you want to follow those rules to be like the other kids that’s okay; if you don’t want to follow the rules that’s okay too, and we’ll help you figure all that out.”
That’s kind of oversimplifying a years worth of conversation LOL but it was something along those lines
ETA we also picked out multiple outfits the first few weeks of school and offered the idea of trying out different combinations to see how it felt. Kiddo was always super confident in himself so we didn’t have concerns about any potential insecurity on his part over his choices which for me as a parent would make a difference in a different kid
ETA2 another n=1 note…my kid was picked on occasionally and he’s described a couple people as bullying him (aside from a kid in early elementary school that I’d known about) BUT I think because he’s just always known exactly who he is and is comfortable in himself, he always treated those incidents like annoyances and even though he did alter behaviors like we avoided a cafe that a kid who bullied him worked at in high school it doesn’t seem to have affected his self-esteem. I always felt like my job was to try my best to see who my kid is and honor who he knows he is (I personally think we all do as wee kidlets but are shaped to different degrees by external influences) and use all of that information as a way to give him tools to navigate the world that will be totally different from the tools another kid needs. So that informed a lot of our choices around cultural expectations.
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This is a weird awkward one
So toddler has started (again) attempting to figure out how boobs work/talking poking etc. I’m not into it. But my breasts aren’t a no go zone because breastfeeding.
So today it was:
We don’t play with boobs. Okay maybe adults do, but kiddos just get milk. Can we clean that up and make me less crazy?
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Boobs being only for milkies is reasonable to me. I was never the breastfeeding mom that let that nipple twiddling, basically making boobs a second comfort object thing go on. I don’t think you have to be either. Sometimes you just need space LOL. No is a love word, too, I say!
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I’m super failing at this gender neutral clothing stuff, I gotta say, and I feel bad about it whenever i think it.
I will never tell my kid they cannot wear a thing if they want it based on gender grounds. But I’m not going out of my way to find traditionally feminine clothes on him to break a box.
I am in a weird place where I am anxious about making my kid a bullying target to further my worldview (which is super important to me) but do want to model good gender neutral behavior.
Maybe I said that all wrong. Please feel free to push and prod on it.
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My personal (as in just me) opinion is that for me as a parent to make my child wear certain clothing of any type is putting my worldview and preferences onto them, instead of letting them discover their preferences and develop their worldview.
I think letting kids explore different textures and colors and later different roles is important. I do not think making my kid try on xyz is a necessary way to do that. For my own kid that would not have even been healthy. He had strong opinions and my making him try things just to check boxes in my own worldview scorecard would have been dismissing his developing worldview).
We definitely had dress up / make believe / play clothes and costumes that reflected a whole lot of different roles. All my son’s preschool playgroup friends would rotate through them all, princess to fire fighter, regardless of their gender. I think that type of exploration is good, to build empathy.
Some of us noticed that our kids gravitated toward certain things more than others - my kid loved flouncy sparkly bright stuff, so we didn’t censor those items out of hand me down bags. I don’t remember ever actively going out and buying “girl” clothes for him. The closest I came was him finding a really sweet pair of jeans with a leather stripe down the side that he really loved in a thrift store, and moving them to the boy’s clothing section after his friend made a comment and he put them back. The irony was that his friend thought they were sooo coooool once they were in the boy’s section haha.
For me it was more about talking through that stuff rather than making him do it. Like talking about boy vs girl clothes and why I think that’s weird but not everybody thinks that way. Or talking about how some people are born a boy but they know they’re a girl (simplified for young kiddo language comprehension). Stuff like that. I don’t think holding space for a kid to find themselves at all means we should strive to make our kids actively try out different gender expressions if they aren’t seeking it on their own.
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I think one has to start by acknowledging the duality of appearance (and other) norms in society… I think it’s a disservice to teach kids, eg “how you look doesn’t matter” because it’s more complicated… Perhaps we would like it to not matter, beyond self - expression, but that is not the world we live in. It matters for social acceptance, getting jobs, being taken seriously. But we also don’t want to approve and encourage judging people on these grounds.
I really like @katscratch 's approach of “other kids might think this and that doesn’t mean it’s right but its fine if you want to follow those ‘rules’ while you’re there”
Also, I had very few dresses after we moved to the US and my grandparents stopped getting them for me. My mom’s position was “dresses are for prim behavior not standing on your head, and as a kid standing on your head is more important than wearing dresses.” This did not stop me wearing dresses later in life. Takeaway: dresses for no one is fine, imo.
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Follow up, soapbox
This is even more true for “it doesn’t matter what people think.” Our greatest evolutionary strengths are/were our social dynamics. We depend on social bonds for survival, or at least our brains think we do. Exile is effectively death, to our brains.
So, it’s a balancing act. Ideally, find genuine friendships that accept your whole weird self (everyone is weird). But learning to go along with harmless but nonsensical norms is a life skill in the existing environment. It’s identifying harmless vs slow-burn-damaging that gets hairy…
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“Breasts are for mommy to make milk. They are not toys.” I wouldn’t even get into what adults do with them.
Side note- my daughter was crying because her nipples are small. She told me she wanted to be able to feed her baby. I told her if she has a baby, her nipples will get bigger and she will be able to feed her. “But dolly is hungry now Mommy!”
Breastfeeding is fun. (No one in my house has been breastfed in more than a year.)
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There is a lot of value in being able to “fit in” in all the ways that can be interpreted.
For me parenting (still) is a balancing act of teaching how the world works and letting my child be who they truly are. For my kid it would have been a disservice to raise him with the mantra “you can be anything you want when you grow up” because that would have left out thousands of hours of conversations about privilege, social structure, education vs learning, etc etc etc.
My scripts for my kid have been long term evolving conversations. My scripts for people like my parents are more one-dimensional 
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I think that makes sense to me.
I’m not going to push my son into things I think are girly, just to prove a point that I am ok with it. But if he wants it, he can have it.
I think kids form opinions very young. They will let you know. My not yet 2 year old is very clear about which clothes he is willing to wear and which ones he will not. And also that his sister cannot have ponytails if he can’t.
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yes this is what I was feeling but didn’t quite pull the right words. Even though I said a hell of a lot of words
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I find all of the clothing talk hilarious at present because my child is slowly adapting to tolerate being undressed but is still deeply angry and upset at being dressed. And would be naked and cold if he could choose. Eventually we will either learn to like some clothes or have an adult nudist
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Our son is wearing clothes now (it’s 20 F outside today), but he definitely runs around in his underwear for most of the year, even during the winter if he’s not going out in the yard. It’s ridiculous.
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I mean, I wish I could get away with that 
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I thought you got rid of the housemate? Now it’s just up to your thermostat and heating bill, isn’t it?
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TRUTH
There have been many undie days inside. It’s the outside bits that elude me.
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We have missed any opportunity for this because dresses for Pikelet are life at the moment. She has options for shorts and trousers and occasionally experiments (her lead) wearing them when she gets ready but the result is always falling on the floor within 5 minutes crying that she needs to wear a dress. Provided the dress isn’t too long, they haven’t thrown up any challenges in the playground.
I have feelings about clothing that stem from my childhood, and almost all my clothing being my brother’s hand me downs. It turns out trying not to project the crap from my own childhood onto my own kids is hard.
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There’s been a lot of “good” and “bad” labeling happening in my house about behavior or people and it makes me really uncomfortable. Had anyone encountered this?
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