Sticks and Stars

AmFam’s recent posts about helping her kids to most effectively navigate the murky waters of school-aged society have forced me to think about some stuff I’ve been kind of pushing off to the side for a long time now.

Growing up, I was not a popular kid. I was a bossy kid, which afforded me some…social standing in elementary school, but even in elementary school I knew that I wasn’t “popular” and that only went further downhill as the years progressed.

I was also not a kid who was good at paying attention to various fashion/personal grooming rules. For example, I refused to wear jeans because I didn’t like how stiff they were so my mom bought me hideous old lady polyester slacks that I happily wore instead. My favorites were the bright red ones because the color was so pretty. I also only bathed once a week and by Thursday or Friday my hair was greasy enough that I could brush it straight back and it would stay that way. My parents, neither of whom were even remotely concerned about fashion, were definitely no help and when the time came that I actually started caring about what I wore (and by “caring” I mean “learned that I was doing something wrong that was going to cause me trouble if I didn’t figure out how to conform regardless of my own personal preferences”) my parents adamantly refused to buy me clothes that might have cost more than what they found at Kmart or thrift stores or received as hand-me-downs from friends. I remember when I was in 5th grade and acid wash jeans were just coming into style. My best friend and I were the only girls in our class who did not have a pair and we were miserable about that fact. Even at Kmart those jeans were $20 and both our parents felt that was a ridiculous amount of money to spend on one pair of jeans…until my best friend’s parents gave in in the face of her misery over the jeans. My parents, however, would not be swayed.

I recall as a kid promising myself that when I had kids I would make sure they had “cool” clothes but as I grew older I struggled with that idea and as an adult it pisses me off that I can’t just let my boys be who they are and wear what they want. Without giving it too much conscious thought, I decided that they could wear just what they wanted and social mandates to the contrary could go fuck themselves. But then I read AmFam’s posts my own painful childhood came flooding back and now I feel very unsure about how to proceed.

I think I also figured that kindergarten was too young to worry about such a thing, but now I feel less sure. This summer my son has been attending a summer camp where the five year olds are the youngest kids and I’ve been shocked at the amount of stuff he’s picked up from the older kids, both in terms of attitude and in terms of culture/values. Preschoolers were cute and cuddly lovers of animals and all things sparkly. Now I’m starting to fear that kindergarten is the transition time where he’ll shift from his little huggy, silly, train loving self to a whiny little smart ass who’s always pestering me for expensive sneakers.

Now I feel very anxious about the start of school. I have always been conscious of the fact that he should be well dressed and groomed so that he doesn’t feed into anyone’s stereotypes about brown kids (even if there have been times when my consciousness has not lived up to reality) but now I’m worried about other things. Is it okay that he has a Thomas backpack? It was the one he really wanted but will other kids tease him for liking something so babyish? And what about his clothes? I buy all of his clothes from a consignment shop where I have masses and masses of store credit. Is that okay? The consignment shop prides itself on only accepting good quality brand name clothing, but still, is a BabyGap shirt from four years ago okay? I have never been able to figure these rules. As a kid I think a lot of it stemmed from being chubby and therefor unable to fit into clothes they sold at “cool” stores (not to mention having no money to spend at those stores even if I could fit into the clothes) but still, while I recognized that fashion trends were happening around me, I could never translate them into what I should acquire for my own body. Even now I rely on jeans and tshirts or jeans and sweaters (I find jeans more comfortable these days than the polyester pants of yore) because they are easy and don’t require interpretation of fashion rules that seem nothing more than intensely stressful.

All of this talk, though, makes me realize that I need to be on top of this stuff, at least at a basic level. In her latest post on the topic AmFam mentioned that she thought she’d be able to tell pretty quickly who would likely become popular by 5th grade and I agree with that sentiment. I don’t care if my son is popular, but I don’t want him to be painfully unpopular either. So I need to get him a hair cut, I need to clear out all the pants and shirts that are getting a little too short. I need his teacher to have a positive first impression of him, and I need other kids and parents to at least not immediately write him off as some dirty, poor brown kid. I’d imagine that as the weeks and months and years of grade school progress, I’ll be able to suss out the rules if I watch careful. But in the meantime he needs to be clean and his clothes need to fit.

I think in some ways I’ll be lucky with regard to my five year old’s kindergarten. While many families in my city would prefer a more progressive school and would also be families who would dress their kids in cute boutique clothes (all organic and sweatshop free, of course), the school my son is going to is a little too fringe for most families (which is why I picked it). I expect their will be a lot of families who flaunt social conventions (or live by nontraditional social conventions) and so there may be more latitude for freedom of expression. We shall see.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.