When Girls Wear Dresses on the Playground, Things Can Get Complicated
Photo by Victoria Snowber/Getty Images
There’s an issue heating up on playgrounds, and forgive me for mentioning it, because it concerns unmentionables — girls’ underpants, to be exact, and whether they should or should not be allowed to show when dresses fly up on the monkey bars. It’s an issue I’ve thought about a lot lately, given that my 6-year-old daughter adores both dresses and monkey bars, and that she has been taught by her other mom and me to feel unequivocally free and unashamed about her body.
It frankly (naïvely?) never even crossed our minds to worry about public displays of underpants until the end of kindergarten last year, when another girl nudged us along. “I can see your underwear!” she shouted in the face of my girl, who blissfully hung upside down during recess, her dress covering her face. Though my daughter’s response was, “So what?” she was confused, and so later we explained that some people are shy about underwear showing, but that we were okay with it if she was. She said she couldn’t care less, and so now, into first grade, we’ve continued as we always have, and while the playground-panties police are still out in force, she seems happily immune.
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Not so for her sweet friend, though, who shares a similar “who cares” outlook but was reduced to sobbing at recess recently when another girl made a fuss about her visible undies. Rather than help her feel okay about it, a teacher on the scene suggested she start wearing shorts under her dresses — a solution, I’ve come to learn, that’s employed by lots of parents. But the teacher’s blame-the-victim response was alarming. Since when are a 6-year-old’s underpants cause for panic and shame?
Since 2013 at the very least, apparently, which is when Maidenform started formally cashing in on the concern with its introduction of Playground Pals. The product, in case you don’t know, is a pack of thin mini-shorts (two for about $12) marketed to girls for wearing “under her favorite dress” so “she’ll be covered no matter where her playground adventures take her.” The mere existence of Playground Pals overwhelms me with sadness.
But I started asking around recently, in person and on Facebook, and quickly discovered that I am in the minority on the issue. Besides the mom of a 3-year-old who says she has “no problem with underwear showing,” several parents that I consider to be progressive do require shorts under dresses on their 4-year-olds, with reasons ranging from “protection while playing” to “underwear is private and shouldn’t be seen by the whole playground.” Another mom says it’s a rule for her 6-year-old because it “gives her the freedom to be as active as she wishes without showing off her underpants.” She adds, “Personally, I don’t want to see the underpants of any kid, or adult, that I’m not in a familial (or familiar) relationship with.”
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Of the moms who don’t require shorts or leggings, most at least encourage them, with some noting that the girls actually require it for themselves. One mom feels that wearing an extra layer of shorts is “empowering” for her 4-year-old, and that dresses themselves are a big part of the problem.
“At this age, play is the center of everything, and she can play comfortably and safely with shorts on — just like we wouldn’t go to the gym in a dress,” she notes. “Then there is the issue of the sexualization of young girls. Skirts and dresses are the clothes women wear to look attractive and sexy. This is a product of our cultural construct of feminine beauty. She isn’t able to participate in this on her own terms at this point, so we create the boundary.”
It’s an interesting perspective — and one shared by Diane Levin, professor of education at Wheelock College in Boston and coauthor of “So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and How Parents Can Protect Their Kids.” She notes that, when she taught kindergarten back in the 1970s, girls didn’t wear dresses, because of the rise of the feminist movement.
“I would say it’s sad that a 6-year-old wants to wear a skirt today,” Levin tells Yahoo Parenting. “But are parents bad for putting them in this situation? No. The best thing to do is to be talking about it — to explain that some people think you shouldn’t worry about [showing underwear] and some think you should,” and to gauge your child’s reaction. “Just do it in a way that’s not critical and that feels safe, so that she can come to you. The more connected you can be, without just saying ‘do this, don’t do that,’ the easier it will be.”
One parent I spoke with agrees that it’s all in the approach, noting that, while she might alert her 6-year-old to underwear showing in public, she is careful to never shame or scare or talk about being ladylike. “I absolutely loathe the word ‘modesty’ when it refers to anything that is related to girls and women,” she says. “I get really upset when people (mostly older women) tell her to cross her legs or cover herself.”
Tomi-Ann Roberts, author of “The Sexualization of Girls and Girlhood: Causes, Consequences and Resistance” and chair of the Colorado College department of psychology, passionately agrees with that sentiment. “I think that using a word like ‘modesty’ around a 6-year-old is screwed up,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “That is sexualizing a child. And to call underpants showing on a 6-year-old ‘immodest’ is sexualizing a child. I find it absolutely astonishing.”
Roberts, who recalls allowing her now-grown daughters to run around naked on the beach when they were little — and that she was not the only parent to permit it — likens the shorts-under-skirts approach to that of putting a 3-year-old in a bikini. “Those triangle tops imply that there is something underneath that needs to be covered up,” she says. “A naked child is not a sexualized child — it’s a child.”
As for those who ask why a little girl is wearing a dress in the first place, she says, “Because she wants to! Who cares what your daughter is wearing?” Roberts, like Levin, suggests parents simply discuss the issue with their child, and that they make “mindful” efforts to not shame.
“The first step here is educating parents to see that, when we cover up our children, we ourselves are participating in sexualizing them. And if we could realize that, then we could maybe be angry about the culture instead of perpetuating it,” Roberts notes. “By our so-called protection of them, we need to ask what price we are paying. Are we sacrificing their self esteem, their capacity to feel good about their bodies in the world? It won’t be long before the world will tell her she is nothing but sexual being. The sadness, for me, is that it’s going to come soon enough.”
