Glamaour Era magazine Glamaour Era Global | Page 60
Come to think of it, should I worry if my son likes to dress up like a
cheerleader?
Not unless he's rooting for the enemy team. "This is a very common
behavior," says Jack Maypole, M.D., a pediatrician at Boston
Medical Center, and again, it's a step in kids' guring out gender
identities: Before about age 4, children may be able to
identify a picture of a person as either male or female, but they may
think that if the subject changes clothing or hairstyle,
he or she changes sex as well. Dress-up helps kids test out theories
and arrive at the more mature understanding that clothes
don't make the man (or woman).
What are my kids getting out of this kind of play?
Literally walking in other people's shoes may give kids valuable
experience in, um, walking in other people's shoes. In fact,
studies have linked role-play to empathy: Kids who engaged in it
were more skilled in judging how other people might feel than
those who didn't.
A rousing game of "zookeeper" also turns out to be great preparation
for the life skills kids will soon need. Not only do they
get plenty of unhurried practice with buttoning, zipping and
otherwise arranging clothing, they also strengthen their language
and social skills, from negotiation and storytelling ("Let's
pretend...") to problem solving ("How would you catch a runaway
lion?"). And, says Barbour, "When kids substitute a wooden block for
a phone, they are thinking symbolically. That's a precursor to all
later academic experiences, like reading, writing and math."
My son hasn't shown any interest in dress-up. Could this be a Y-
chromosome thing?
The research gives no reason to think so, says former Yale senior
research scientist Dorothy Singer, Ph.D., who coauthored the
classic The House of Make-Believe. What is true, she says, is that
some preschools (or parents) might consider dress-up to be
chiey girls' domain and stock up accordingly on aprons or feather
boas, inadvertently dening who gravitates there. But given the
right props—Singer is a fan of hats—many boys love this kind of
play, too.
For Kari Hicks's 4-year-old son, Mason, all it took was viewing an
Elmo DVD in which his hero dressed up as a reman.
"We offered to get him the costume, and he got so excited," says the
Buffalo, NY, mom. "His favorite now is a policeman uniform.
He saunters out of his room, acting all cool and trying to 'arrest' me.
It's hilarious!"