How Can I Help My Children Make Appropriate Clothing Choices?

My children have very specific tastes. How do parents steer their kids toward appropriate and flattering choices for clothing, glasses and hair styles and give them enough confidence to not follow trends? — Sally, Marietta, Pa.

The issue when it comes to the parent-child fashion gap, as in any form of coded dress, is what exactly constitutes “appropriate.” The word has become a default for dressing in almost any context — it’s the basis of most dress codes — yet it is one that resides entirely in the mind and mores of the beholder.

Put another way, one person’s appropriate is another’s entirely inappropriate, no matter what age. Honestly, when it comes to clothing, I think the word should be banned, as it causes more problems than it solves. And this is particularly true for parents and children.

Clothing, after all, is simply a means of self-expression. As any parenting site or psychologist can tell you, it is one of the most accessible tools for beginning to assert one’s own sense of self. That’s why it can be such a contentious subject — it’s the stand-in for a lot of other stuff, especially the separation of child from family. That’s also why there is a whole subset of parenting literature and psychology devoted to the matter of fashion fights.

At the same time, parenting is essentially about getting one’s children ready to be adults, so giving them the leeway to start making their own decisions and helping them understand what that means is part of the process. One of the easiest ways to do that is through clothes.

That doesn’t make it any more comfortable when they decide to define leggings as pants, or a tunic as a dress, or wear pants halfway down their backsides (we pretty much all turn into clichés when that happens — or our parents). But remember that people dress according to context and community.

Trends you may find distasteful or just plain weird are probably popular among your children’s friends. It may seem as if your child is giving in to peer pressure (bad!), but the only way for someone to learn how to manage that particular phenomenon is to wrestle with it, to understand what it means to look like part of a group, literally, or go their own way.