Are Kids Growing Up Too Soon?

Back-to-school shopping has always been my favorite ritual. As a kid, I loved taking the train into Boston with my mother on a hot August day, trying on plaid dresses and cordovan shoes, eating lunch — always macaroni and cheese at Colestone’s — heading home, then arranging all the loot on my bed and waiting for my father to come in from work, to show him all we had bought.

As a mother, I loved shopping for new clothes and shoes with my children; well, not so much my son. I brought home clothes for him. But for my girls and me, back-to-school shopping was a much-anticipated event. Every first week of August, we would pick a day and set out early, not by train to Boston, but by car to the South Shore Plaza, where the girls would try on oversized sweaters, plaid skirts, and denim jackets and school shoes — not cordovan, but still, flat, with straps. And practical.

Now I shop for new clothes and shoes for my grandchildren. And up until now, it’s always been fun, another perk of grandparenting. I shop, not just for back-to-school, but all the time, because baby and toddler and little kid clothes are impossible to resist. Even boy baby clothes!

A quick trip into Marshall’s for, say, a frame or a new photo book (these, too, being grandchild related) inevitably leads to the children’s section and racks and racks of adorable and affordable clothes. "Look what I found!" I've come home declaring, once or twice a week, for the past eight years.

Now, though, there is trouble in River City. My oldest granddaughter, Lucy, went from a size 6X to a 7 over the summer. And it's a whole new world.

Goodbye to soft cottons and T-shirts that hang loose on a person’s body like T-shirts are supposed to hang. Goodbye to jeans a child can bend in and to jersey dresses that are comfortable. Goodbye to Peter Pan collars and bows and lace. Goodbye to looking and being 7 and 8 and 9 and 10 and 11.

What’s popular and trendy — and what children still in grammar school want and beg for because it’s what teenage girls wear and it’s what they see in mall stores and discount stores, on racks dedicated solely to them — are faux leather, spandex, skinny jeans, tight T-shirts, and dresses appropriate for a 20-year-old going to a club, not a child going to school.  

And the stores are overflowing with these things.

Age-appropriate clothes do exist. They’re out there. But you have to search for them, at online boutiques and in specialty stores. Gymboree, Hanna Andersson, LL Bean, Land’s End — these places buck the trend. But they’re not on every corner. They’re not in the weekly flyers that come with our Sunday newspapers or in the ads that children constantly see. And they are not inexpensive.

When I was in fifth grade and begging to wear nylons, my mother used to say to me, "You're grown up your whole life. You're only a kid for a little while. Enjoy it.”

Childhood is too short. Adults know this. So why encourage kids to grow up fast? Why do we permit it?

All little girls want to be big girls. They want the party dresses and the heels. And they want the lipstick, too.

And they should get it, but only when they pretend. Because that's the beauty of childhood. You can be a grown-up for a while — a princess on her way to a ball, a ballerina, a mother pushing a baby carriage, a doctor in a tutu strutting around in pink Barbie heels.

And then when the heels start to hurt and the tutu begins to itch, it’s back to hanging upside down on the monkey bars in shorts and a T-shirt stained with a red ice pop.

A loose T-shirt.