Reply to 2 year old refuses to get dressed in the mornjng

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[quote=Anonymous]Whew, so many people in this thread who cannot imagine a different parenting experience than they had!

I had the kind of kid who could not be forced to get dressed, and definitely not in clothes she didn't like. If you approached the situation from an angle of "this is what we are doing, it's not up to you," you were in for an epic battle. And it's not like that battle would end with the clothes, either. She felt so strongly about getting dressed that going into conflict over clothes would lead to more tantrums generally, more push back on everything from food to leaving the house to baths and bedtime. Everything.

But if we just let her wear what she wanted (which, yes, some days were her pajamas with seasonally appropriate layers on top), you short circuit all of that and we can have a great day.

For some kids, clothes are really, really personal and very closely tied to their sense of personhood. Our DD has always been that way. She's very visual -- obsessed with color and pattern, really into drawing and painting, a tiny interior designer with very specific ideas for how she wants to arrange her room. This stuff is really important to her and how she expresses who she is.

As she's gotten older, it is possible to get her to wear clothes that she didn't pick (she has to wear a uniform for school, and she's accepted that even though she does always try to sneak in her personal touches). If I bring the "wrong" clothes for her to change into after dance class she'll put them on with no fanfare even as she'll calmly note to me that she doesn't like them, for future reference. So it's not like letting her dress herself has turned her into a rude, impossible child. On the contrary, she's very well mannered and emotionally mature. And she also has a very clear sense of herself and how she wants to look and the image she wants to project to the world.

It works out. You really do not have to wrestle your kids into clothes, I promise. Some kids will let you dress them, others won't. It's fine. Work with the kid you have. If your child is screaming bloody murder about something, that's an indication that this is a really important issue for them and it is probably worth it to try and work with them on it instead of drawing a hard line, provided it's something like getting dressed that doesn't really matter at all in the long run.[/quote]

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