I have two daughters, 12 and 13, so we’ve been wrestling with the question of style for a long time.  One of the chief problems, according to my daughters, is that I have none.  To which I usually respond, “I may not have style, but you’re still not going out of the house like that.”

They’re right, though.  My girls are much more stylish than I am, or even than I was at their ages.  And they are very different from each other, as well.  My son, on the other hand, is 6, and could not care less what he wears, though he will occasionally request one of the shirts with a dinosaur on it.

So  how do we help our children develop their own personal style without sacrificing our own judgement about what is and isn’t acceptable?  Here are a few tips that have helped our family achieve relative (if not total) peace on the style front.

• Let them be themselves!  My mom, God love her, wanted to dress me up like her own life-sized Barbie doll, but I have always been a jeans-and-t-shirt kind of girl.  My own daughters have gone through frilly-and-pink phases, only-black phases, tailored slacks phases, and oh-my-God-I-have-breasts phases.  Obviously I have my favorites, but my favorites don’t have to be their favorites. 

• Keep your values clear and consistently enforced.  We don’t do low necklines or bare midriffs, because we’re trying to teach our children to respect their bodies, not flaunt them, and modesty is an important part of that.  DH and I want people to look at our kids and see intelligent, polite young people, not just exposed body parts.     But besides consistent rules, we also have talks about what the culture is saying about women and men when everyone in their favorite magazines has so much skin showing.  They’ve all begun to take some pride in being a bit counter-cultural. 

• Look at pics with them.  Look at the Oscar issue of People Magazine with your daughters, for example, and talk about why certain dresses are flattering and why others aren’t.  Ask your sons if they like certain shirts in the Penney’s catalogue, and if they would wear them.  Ask why or why not.  They might not be able to articulte their reasons fully, but it gets them thinking about their own likes and dislikes. 

• Praise, praise, praise.  When they look nice, say so.  Be specific, because they really don’t know what works and what doesn’t.  They’re trying to figure that out.  You might say, “That color really goes well with your skin,” or “You look really handsome in that T-rex shirt,” or “Those jeans are really flattering on you.”   We don’t want our girls or boys to focus over-much on their appearance, but we do want them to take pride in it and know how to dress themselves to bring out their best. 

• The Rule.  The rule in our house is, “I won’t make you wear anything you hate, but you’re not allowed to wear anything I hate.”  They are still kids, much as they might sometimes like to deny it, and you can’t replace your judgement with theirs.  You still have to set boundaries and protect them from their own inexperience. 

• Get back-up!  There should be an adult in your life whose opinion matters to your child.  If Uncle JoJo says he looks cool in that shirt, he’s more inclined to wear it.  Sometimes they just can’t hear us parents, and the input needs to come from somewhere else.

Don’t forget, they’re their own people, with their own taste and sense of themselves.  You can’t ultimately suppress that, but you can help it develop in the right direction.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features a review of two books, The Parents We Mean to Be by Richard Weissbourd, and Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy.  I’m not sure why they are reviewed together, except that they do have a common theme of parents backing off and leaving their kids alone a little bit.

Weissbourd’s book focuses on how parents have failed to provide moral leadership, instead focusing on either self-esteem or success.  This can lead to a total failure to teach kids the hard lessons of life such as working hard and doing the right thing, or, conversely, it can lead to kids under so much pressure to succeed that they stagger under the burden.  In neither case are children becoming good, moral citizens–they’re just becoming some combination of selfish and successful. 

The book by Skenazy is about how we over protect our kids, so much so that they don’t learn to live with failure or to take care of themselves.  The WSJ article writes:

Ms. Skenazy, a humor columnist, believes we should give “our children the freedom we had without going nuts with worry.” She lampoons safety-obsessed parents who see a threat-filled world, from metal baseball bats and raw cookie dough to Halloween-candy poisoners and kidnappers. She advises turning off the news, avoiding experts and boycotting baby knee pads “and the rest of the kiddie safety-industrial complex.”

I can go with Weissbourd’s thesis that parents’ job is not to make kids feel good, but to make them be good.  I see a tragic lack of moral guidance from parents toward their kids.  I give my kids as much freedom as I possibly can, and my DH and I work hard to help them become independent and to responsible.  A big part of that is us explaining the moral implications of actions and words, and them accepting the consequences of their actions and words.  We seldom let them off the hook just because it would make them feel bad.

But I’m a little more hesitant to accept Skenazy’s idea that we shouldn’t worry so much about our kids.  Anyone who reads newspapers or magazines, who watches the news, or who gets amber alerts on their cell phones knows that there are scary people out there who actively want to hurt our children.  Clearly, we have to hold on loosely.  But if we don’t protect them, who will?  What are we here for, if not that?