Last night Cooper slipped on my ballet tutu and started twirling around. I could see his face light up when he did it. It’s a wonderfully joyous feeling to twirl in a skirt, and even more so in a tutu. He had me take several videos, one of which I posted on Instagram.
He asked last night if he could wear the tutu to school the next day. My immediate response was “YES!”, but my inner dialogue was more “Oh no, kids are mean and he is going to have his feelings hurt. It’s not acceptable for boys to wear tutus and he doesn’t know that.”
I started thinking about it – Why isn’t it acceptable for boys to wear skirts or tutus? Charlotte gets to wear ‘boy’ things, so why doesn’t Cooper get to wear ‘girl’ things? I had similar thoughts when Charlotte asked to get her ears pierced and Cooper made the same request. I don’t have any good reason to say, “girls can, but boys can’t,” especially because a phrase I have hear often is, “Girls can do anything boys can do.” The opposite should be true as well, “Boys can do anything girls can do.” What if I was told girls aren’t supposed to be engineers? Or Chris had been told boys aren’t supposed to stay at home with their kids?
So this morning, when he asked again, Chris said “Yes” as well. We talked to him about how our family thinks boys and girls should be able to do the same things, but not everyone feels that way. Sometimes people think that boys shouldn’t wear tutus or girls shouldn’t wear swim trunks and they might say mean things that could hurt our feelings. We explained that he could choose to take the tutu off at any time, or he could tell people that boys can wear whatever they want.
I very much wanted to disallow him from wearing the tutu in order to protect him from hurt feelings. Chris very much wanted to avoid him being labeled the boy who wears tutus, especially since he will likely go to school for years with all of these kids. I won’t always be there to protect my children, and certainly not from getting their feelings hurt. What I can give them is a true understanding of acceptance, respecting and responding to other people’s opinions, and a self-confidence to navigate the world. Afterall, confidence isn’t, “Will they like me?”, but rather “I will, even if they don’t.”
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