Letting My Kid Dress Herself (Even when that Means Princess Shoes)

In my mind, my daughter is always dressed like an unironic version of Quinoa the Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler, or one of the Olive Us kids, or a girl from an Emily Winfield Martin illustration: all primary colors and stripes and anchors, simple, pale sundresses that billow as she races around a grassy field somewhere, or else a chic tiny trenchcoat for riding the subway and pretending I'm not sitting right next to her (because as she's already telling me, I ruin all her fun). Whimsical and classic. No brands, obviously, or cartoons. Please! Before I had children I wondered why I was always seeing tiny girls dressed head-to-toe in pink (hadn't their parents read those articles about how girls are brainwashed into liking pink?) or slathered in trademarked Disney princess everything (weren't their mothers concerned about the whole princesses-eating-their-daughters thing?).

It's the primal before/then of parenthood. I was, after all a perfect mother before I had children. We all were. Now I realize that once the children are actual children, they seem to think they are their own people, and they have all this "free will" stuff. My daughter has more opinions about sartorial matters than you knew existed. Since she was 18 months old she's insisted on picking out her own outfits and accessories (she favors pattern-mixing and layers, season be darned) and since I want to encourage her to be her own tiny human, it works for me. In theory. Sort of.

Then the shoes happened. Casting around for an effective bribe, I told her she could pick them out herself if she got ready nicely for school X-many times. But I forgot to do my due diligence at the shoe store before taking her in, and I'd also forgotten about the scourge of character-driven kids' footwear in contemporary low-priced retail establishments. She squinted at the plain leather Mary Janes (which I would have picked in an instant), frowned at the black Converse All-Stars ("Look, you can match me!" I tried), and then her face lit up. "Ohhh," she breathed, the way you do when you find your wedding dress. "Could…do you think…could I possibly…?" She had found the shoes. The pink, sparkly, light-up sneakers. Did I mention the Disney princesses? They somehow managed to fit every princess imaginable on these teensy sneaks: Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, princesses I can't identify: a chaos of impossibly proportioned pawns of marriage plots. Weren't these shoes (and the mass-marketed fairy tales behind them) going to destroy my daughter's self-esteem and teach her that her worth lies in her youth and beauty? Where were the understated loafers emblazoned with contemporary female heads of state?

But the thing is, no one has ever looked at shoes the way this kid looked at these sneakers, like they were precious objects, too beautiful to be believed. And if there's one thing I have learned from fairy tales, it's that shoes are symbolic. (Heck, I wrote an entire novel about shoes saving someone's life.) I like to think that if I also stuff her brain with more interesting female role models -- Emily Warren Roebling, Indira Ghandi, Diana Nyad - the princess shoes won't transform her from a future Marie Curie into a future Miley Cyrus. And if I want her to be a free thinker some day, I suppose I have to give her some choices to make. Even if my mom-friends make fun of me when her sneakers light up at the playground.

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