If your son wanted to wear a dress to school, would you let him?
Megan Fox has not only let her son wear dresses to school but is using the experience to teach him to be confident.
On CBS's The Talk, Fox explained her 6-year-old son's love of fashion.
The Talk - Megan Fox on Son, Noah, Being 'laughed' at for Wearing Dresses to Schoolwww.youtube.com
As Fox says, her son is interested in dresses, though he's still a child.
"He designs, he draws outfits. Yeah, he's very talented, but he's still 6 so, when I do fittings—like, I did one recently and I had this really beautiful yellow dress on, he kept draping it in a way where he's like, 'If we do it like this, it looks like a diaper!'"
Which got a laugh from the hosts and the audience. The next little anecdote explained his dilemma.
Fox continued saying:
"Sometimes, he'll dress himself and he likes to wear dresses sometimes. And I send him to a really liberal, hippy school, but even there, here in California, he still has little boys going, 'Boys don't wear dresses,' or 'Boys don't wear pink.'"
Sadly, the bullying did stop her son from wearing dresses for a bit. However, he decided to try again, and Fox was very supportive.
"He came home, and I was like, 'How was it? Did any of the friends at school have anything to say?' And he was like, 'Well, all the boys laughed when I came in, but I don't care. I love dresses too much'."
The story got a round of applause from the audience.
However, as the story spread, people gave their opinions, not all of which were great.
As expected, there were those who conflated a child wanting to wear dresses with the child being transgender. Which, in case you were wondering, is not how that works.
Children learn bullying from others, so it's best to not teach them to make fun of other kids over things like this.
A dress is just an article of clothing, which has the practical purpose of covering your body. Any other ideas and notions assigned to it are because we as a society treated the garment certain ways in the relatively recent past.
And I mean like, only in the last 100 years. Up until the 1920s, it was not only normal, but expected for young boys to wear dresses.
The change to have boys wear pants even as a small child was due to restrictive gender presentation after the World Wars. Despite such a recent history, you still have people vehemently fighting for boys only wearing pants.
Luckily people are more than willing to defend dresses.
Some questioned what the child's father thought of this.
Fox's husband, Brian Austin Green has already expressed support for his son back in 2017 when people decided the 4-year-old shouldn't be wearing dresses.
He told Hollywood Pipeline's 'Straight from the Source':
"I've heard from some people that they don't agree—they don't agree with him wearing dresses."
"To them I say, I don't care. He's 4 and if he wants to wear it, then he wears it. It's dresses or goggles or slippers—whatever. It's his life."
Out of the comments attacking the practice of boys wearing dresses, there was a special breed that seemed particularly absurd. These compared letting your son wear dresses to completely unrelated scenarios
Seriously, how do you compare a child wearing dresses to letting them touch a hot pot or stealing?
Fox and Green are more than willing to support their children though all of this. Since Fox's interview on The Talk, an old photo of their son on Instagram has received a lot of new comments, some negative, some positive.
But the parents have stated repeatedly, they don't care about what people have to say. They're going to support their child, and teach him to be confident.
Dressing up is a fun part of childhood. And whether little people want to dress as a Disney princess (available here)...
...or a future career (available here)...
...it's all a fun part of being a kid.
*****
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