Sisters Shiloh, left, and Zahara Jolie Pitt, right, prefer different styles of clothing.
All kids like to dress-up, right? They’ll run around the house–or even ask to go the the supermarket–wearing a princess dress, Batman costume, crowns, swords, face-paint…parents of any normal child have seen it all.
But what about when your little girl wants to dress like a boy? Or what if your little boy wants to wear girls clothing? This mom says her toddler son has always had a “preference for pretty,” because he lives in a house with a bunch of female cousins, he was drawn to wearing princess tiara’s, ballerina dresses and nail polish.
In the case of Shiloh (pictured above), mom Angelina Jolie defends her four-year-old daughter’s style choices. “I think she (Shiloh) is fascinating, the choices she is making. And I would never be the kind of parent to force somebody to be something they are not. I think that is just bad parenting,” she told Reuters on Saturday. Angelina also told Vanity Fair: “Shiloh, we feel, has Montenegro style. It’s how people dress there. She likes tracksuits, she likes suits. She likes to dress like a boy. She wants to be a boy. So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys’ everything. She thinks she’s one of the brothers…I used to get dressed up in costumes and jump around.”
Would you say “yes” and shake it off as a phase or would you be concerned? When a kid that dresses like the opposite sex does it mean that they are gay or transgendered?
Experts say probably not. “Some boys will be more interested than others in dressing up as feminine characters,” says Dr. Robert Lindeman, a pediatrician in Natick, Massachusetts, to Babble.com. “This does not mean that they suffer from gender confusion…Little boys in the preschool years are starting to learn about gender differences,” he explains. “To them, the differences are merely facts. When children ‘cross-dress,’ they are merely having fun with this new fact they’ve learned. If their parents laugh, it reinforces their sense that they’re being funny.”
I have a very girly girl, but I can honestly say I don’t know how I would react if my daughter preferred a very “boy” style. And I’m not totally convinced about what the doctor is saying, are you?
