How "different" is different enough in a child...or too much?

(via Les Jenkins)

Say you’ve got a five-year-old son who isn’t conforming to traditional gender roles. Specifically, he likes to wear skirts and dresses instead of the customary pants most little boys wear. Do you try to convince him to dress traditionally or do you allow him to cross gender lines in his clothing choices?

I’m not a parent, but I’ve often wondered how I might have acquitted myself had I decided to have children. Through watching people around me raising their offspring, I’ve learned there are a million and one different things that parents are responsible for teaching their children. Some are pretty basic, some are social expectations, and some get down to the very core of who a child is. That’s a pretty heavy responsibility, particularly if a parent is faced with the dilemma of a child who decides they want to think and act outside the box. The decisions a parent makes and how they deal with issues can and will have an impact on the type of adult a child evolves into.

As a parent, how do you handle that? Let’s say that, like Nils Pickert, you have a child who decides they prefer wearing dresses over traditional boys’ clothing. Do you steer him away from that and teach him that wearing girls’ clothing is wrong and/or inappropriate…and in doing so perhaps teach him to believe there’s something wrong with him? Do you allow him to work his way through what may well be one of many “phases” in his young life? Or, like Pickert, do you decide to support your son and teach him that there’s nothing wrong with being who he is…whatever that might mean?

I think a decision like that says more about the kind of person a parent is than it does about a child. Does a parent react based on the own fear, prejudice, and perhaps even insecurity about their own sexuality? Do they decide they don’t want their child to be “different”? Or are they secure enough in their own self and their beliefs that they see no reason not to allow a child to experiment and tries things that, socially speaking, might be considered a bit “off the reservation?”

It’s things like Pickert’s dilemma that sets me to thinking about how much of what we as adults do is based on the fear of being different. We’re so steeped in our own prejudice and beliefs that it can sometimes be difficult to contemplate stepping outside those boundaries for fear of being viewed as “different.” Would I do the same thing Nils Pickert did? I’d like to think so, but I don’t have a five-year-old son who like to wear dresses. There’s no way to authoritatively know how I’d react unless I was to somehow find myself in that situation, but I do admire Pickert’s open-mindedness. Instead of reacting out of fear and prejudice, he’s decided to let his son be who he is; not always the easiest thing for most parents.

Would that more parents could see their way clear to allowing children to freely be who they are. In the long run, I think it would make the world a far better place.