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.

The following reflection on Fathers’ Day was written by my husband and fellow writer.  I thought it contained some pretty important thoughts, and I wanted to share them with you.  The picture below isn’t actually my husband or kids, but I thought it was a nice pic for Fathers’ Day.  It’s from blog.fachisthers.com

So, here it is, Fathers’ Day again, and twice in the past twenty-four hours I have heard people—well, men actually; specifically fathers—refer to the day in ways that make it sound like the consolation prize/year’s-worth-of-Free-Turtle-Wax version of Mothers’ Day.

Yesterday, driving into Kansas City to visit my own father, a disc jockey asked men to call in and tell her whether Fathers’ Day was a ‘real’ holiday or a made-up holiday.  The first man to call in was himself a father who affirmed that it is, indeed, a made-up holiday.  His wife, he said, deserves her own holiday, but he certainly doesn’t.  When pressed, he said that she puts up with the kids, works outside the home as well as within, generally makes life nice for everyone in the house, and he doesn’t do much of anything. 

The disc jockey tried to wheedle him into admitting he does more than he was letting on.  “Noooothing?” she asked.  “You don’t even take out the traaaash?”

“Oh, I do some things,” he said, “mostly around the house and with the car.  I do stuff with the kids when she needs a break.”

“But you have a job, right?  You bring home a paycheck.”

“Oh, sure, sure.  But she does the real work.  What I do is nothing.  She’s the one who needs a special day, not me.”

A few hours later, I was talking with a friend on the phone and he mentioned that his wife is upset because she can’t afford to make a big deal out of Fathers’ Day this year.  Their family finances have been upset by an unexpected death in the family, a long, drawn-out trip to Arkansas, and lost shifts at the hospital.  The checking account is bare.  At dinner last night, he said, she broke into tears because he gave her a great Mothers’ Day and she can’t reciprocate.  And his response was to put his arms around her and coax a smile out of her by saying, “Sweetheart, Mothers’ Day is a real holiday.”

He wouldn’t dream of not celebrating Mothers’ Day in a big way, he told me.  But Fathers’ Day?  It’s enough that she would do something if she could.  He really doesn’t need anything more than that, because he doesn’t really do anything around the house anyway.

These are not isolated sentiments.  My own father and both my grandfathers used to say the same thing: Mothers’ Day is real, Fathers’ Day isn’t.  And the sense seemed to be that everyday is Fathers’ Day when you get to go to work, and deal with the kids only a few hours a day, and come home to a cooked meal, and not go through childbirth. 

A massively informal poll I conducted with this one friend on the phone, the guy on the radio, and my two brothers, seems to confirm that men see Mothers’ Day as the day they formally thank their wives for 364 days of work (365 if the women have to clean up from their own Mothers’ Day breakfast-in-bed), and Fathers’ Day is the day they feel guilty—perhaps are purposely made to feel guilty, under the guise of being ‘appreciated’—for not doing much of anything.  I call this the ‘Fathers’ Day as Giant Stick to Goad Me Into Doing More Around the House’-theory of the holiday.

Sounds like a conspiracy to me.  If it’s true.  But I don’t think it’s true.

I think what’s going on is that men are trained now, from an early age, to think of their contribution as niggling compared to the contribution made by their wives.  This might be an unintended result of the Women’s Movement, I don’t know.  I wonder if it’s not the adult male corollary of something I see my children do, when I say to one, “You did a great job on that picture,” and the other will say, “Why don’t you like my picture?”  Or I’ll give one a hug and the other will say, “I’m not special.” 

The idea seems to be that love (or praise or whatever) is a commodity, and there’s only so much of it to go around.  If I give it to one, then there’s not enough left for all the others.  I have to remind my children that love and praise and appreciation are not limited.  They are drawn from a bottomless well; no one will go thirsty just because someone else’s bucket is full.

Men—being the either/or, black-and-white thinkers that they are—have gone from thinking that theirs is the only contribution in the house that matters, to thinking that their contribution doesn’t matter at all.  Now that we celebrate what we used to derisively refer to as ‘women’s work,’ now that we have two-income families and mom is just as likely as dad to work outside the home, there seems to be a sense among men that their contribution doesn’t really matter anymore. 

“She does the real work.  What I do is nothing.  She’s the one who needs a special day, not me.  I’m not special.”

With the men I know, that’s not false modesty.  They say that because they really believe it.  My friend on the phone really believes it; the guy on the radio seems to believe it too.

Perhaps we should take the opportunity this Fathers’ Day to remind our fathers that their contributions, however much they wish to downplay them, are real and vital—that their contribution is not less because others are now doing more. 

Fathers’ Day is not a consolation prize.  It’s a real holiday, just as real as Mothers’ Day.  Men should be helped to see what they do as enabling the family to function, in ways every bit as important as what their wives do. 

The well of appreciation is bottomless; there’s plenty enough to go around.

Nickleodeon has had such success over the past 10 years with its Dora the Explorer character that they are considering expanding her to an older group of kids.

Dora is the little girl who finds things and cares for the environment with the help of her talking backpack, talking map, talking boots, and a lot of Spanish lessons.  She’s extremely popular with the under-6 crowd, along with her boy counterpart Diego, who works in a zoo.  But some of those under-6′s have grown up to be 9-12′s, way too old for Dora, but not too old to be a viable nostalgia market.

So, to Nickleodeon’s way of thinking, why not cash in on that?  An older, more mature Dora has been proposed to appeal to the tween crowd.  Now, I think she looks exactly like little Dora would look six or seven years in her future, and now she not only finds lost items, she solves mysteries, in keeping with her increased analytical thinking skills. 

Apparently, though, some parents think new Tween Dora is too sexy.  Seriously.   An article from Entertainment Weekly reports that with her long dark hair and short skirt, some parents think Dora is an inappropriate role model for tween girls. 

I guess you can make up your own mind.  Here’s the little sexpot herself:

Now, look.  I have two girls, ages 11 and 13.  Few parents are as into modesty and as against the sexualization of youth as my husband and I are.  But this new Dora is a cute girl wearing cute clothes–that’s not a short skirt, it’s a long top.  Sure, she shows some ankle, but what is this, 1910?  There’s nothing wrong with this image.  She’s precious.  She looks like half the little girls in our neighborhood, my middle child included. 

If I were Nickleodeon, I’d be far less worried about whether New Dora is too sexy than I would be about whether tweens are really a viable market for a new cartoon that isn’t accompanied by a video game counterpart.