My eleven-year-old daughter Tia and I spent an entire afternoon going to something like fifteen different stores looking for cute and trendy clothes for her that wouldn’t age her five years. We did eventually find several shirts, but it took persistence and a lot of looking before we found things that she liked.
It’s incredibly difficult to buy clothes for Tia right now because nothing is really age appropriate. The clothes are either too “little girl”, or they are too mature. She’s beyond frilly dresses and bows, but the small sizes in the junior departments tend to be midriff baring shirts, extremely tight pants, and general styles that make her look well beyond her 11 years. The shorts are short and tight, and dresses end mid-thigh. She’s often relegated to wearing clothes that are too big or athletic looking.
This is not to say that it’s impossible to find age appropriate clothing. It’s simply challenging, and I imagine as she grows and her body changes, the challenge will become even greater.
Things are different for boys. I have fourteen-year-old and nine-year-old sons, and dressing them is no problem. The biggest struggle we have is finding pants that fit my skinny-waisted, long-legged nine-year-old.
But clothing doesn’t mature a boy the way it does a girl. My boys can dress in clothes very similar to their dad and it doesn’t sexualize them. Female clothing alone seems to have the potential to oversexualize young ladies. It’s the constant messages bombarding girls today: the idea that we should be confident in our own skin—so confident that we show as much of it as possible.
We talk a lot with our daughter about what it means to respect her body. We are trying to combat society’s message that confidence and boldness means revealing more skin. We want our daughters to be confident in who they are as people. We encourage them to want strong, healthy bodies, not thin ones. We want them to pursue their natural gifts and talents above popularity. We want them to know that clothing is fun and there’s nothing wrong with looking and feeling pretty, but you don’t have to show off your body to accomplish that. This requires a lot of conversation, and it requires me, as their mother, to model it for them.
Right now, our goal in shopping is to find Tia clothes that make her feel cute without maturing her too quickly. She knows the boundaries we’ve set on clothing, and so she’s pretty good at working with us to find clothes that are age appropriate.
Mostly we want to help our girls look beyond the surface level of outer appearance. We want their first thought when they enter a room not to be “Who in here will notice me?” But rather “Whose day can I brighten? Who can I make smile? Who can I serve in this space?”
Kelli Martin Stuart is an author, blogger and mom of four (two daughters and two sons) living in Florida.
Reporting by Jo Piazza
