The thing is, right now, it’s hard to find a nice little dress for a 4 year old that doesn’t make her look like she’s trying to be Brittney Spears Junior. At least, if you don’t want to spend $40 a dress for things out of catalogues!
I have given up looking at Target, Fred Meyer, or any other local chain store, for modest little knit dresses for my daughters to wear. I could buy some from Lands End ($12 on sale, colors severely limited) or pay more like $40 for one of the non-overstocks. Or maybe I could go to Hanna Andersson and pay $40 for a dress there. Yuck.
Still, it alarms me that the mother has no problem with her very young daughter looking like walking jailbait. And I have no sympathy. The rules were stated. I read in a forum elsewhere that the girl was ‘humiliated’ in front of her class. If this was done in such a way that she was publically embarrassed (“whiny award, anyone?”) then the school should have handled it differently. If however she was caught at the door, and sent home…well, she has nobody but herself and her mom to blame.
So, what, 13-year-old girls should just be allowed to wear whatever they want to school and school-related functions?
‘No cleavage’ is too strict for you? I think this sort of rule is one way of keeping young girls from catching shit from their peers. You put those suckers on display, you’re bound to attract some sort of undesired attention.
I don’t know what the school’s motivations were, but it seems plausible enough to me that the “no cleavage” rule was enacted partially from a desire to protect busty adolescent girls from negative attention.
Even as an “early-bloomer” young girl way back in the Dark Ages, let me tell ya–large boobs were just one of many symptoms of adolescent angst. Anything would do. We were all addled by damned near everything. The whole world was a seething mass of stuff that should dictate pecking order, not that we had the least clue about sorting out any of it.
Look, schools have charge of bundles of inchoate impulses: kids. They lay down rules in a desperate attempt to protect kids against their own worst excesses. Kids, by definition, try out everything without actually being ready for anything. They need a chance to flutter and dry out their wings without actually crashing, y’know? And all of 'em have innate, rapdily shifting, cut-throat social labels of their own.
No rule can possibly protect all of ‘em against themselves, because kids are raging individualists too. They’re also individualists without perspective.
I’ll acquit the school on this one. No matter what the mother thinks, it was a school event and they have good reason to discourage 13 year old girls flashing their tatas. Supposedly schools foster things like self-control, poise, all that good stuff, along the road to imposing actual learnin’.
Right. Might as well herd mink. But they have to try.
Just to reiterate a point that Sternvogel made above, and that everyone else seems to have missed after the OP -
This girl was NOT sent home from her graduation ceremony - it’s way too early in the school year for that. She was sent home from a ceremony for the crowning of Mary, a RELIGIOUS ceremony, after which graduation pictures were going to be taken (presumably because everyone was supposed to be dressed nicely in non-uniform clothes, so that you’d have one photo in dress clothes and one in the standard drape). The ceremony is supposed to be a celebration of Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, complete with hymns and prayers. Heck, when I was little, the crowning of Mary was the only other occasion in which girls could wear their first Holy Communion dresses again (since many make first Communion sometime in April).
I’m afraid I don’t have much sympathy for the situation. The girl attends a Catholic school, where restrictive dress codes are the norm. The ceremony in question was religious. They were informed in advance what would be considered acceptable dress, and they didn’t follow the rules. Nothing really happened except she wasn’t allowed to attend a religious ceremony and then have her official graduation picture taken. Whoop de doo. Mom is a dumbass for making a big deal of this.
And I guess you can count me among the old fogies who think that 13-year-olds don’t need to be in a hurry to a Jane Russell lift-and-separate style dress. She ought to have saved it for high school graduation, when maybe she would no longer count as jailbait.
Oh, and AFAIC, if she catches shit from people about this, she doesn’t have anyone to blame but her mom - perhaps not for questionable approval of the dress, but definitely for calling in the press for something as dumb as this.
On the one hand, I can understand not wanting to spend $40 for a dress, but on the other hand, if it was a ‘dressup’ dress to be used at several fancy functions, what’s $40?
I can understand not wanting to have the gal have a closet full of $40 dresses.
Been there, done that, found the conservative dress. Back in the glorious eighties when I was ‘graduating’ from 8th grade, I was also in the ‘busty and growing’ department and needed a dress for May Crowning, Confirmation, Graduation and two weddings. The dress we ended up with was white, and like this one:
It’s not that hard to find SOMETHING. As others have suggested, a scarf, or a wool pashmina (I’m thiking of getting one for the office as this place is COLD). I’ve had a number of friends who wed or did their quincenera in a very … inappropriate dress but had a jacket made to wear while in the church.
Chotii … I think we’re going to have to learn to sew. I am somehwat glad my first kid is a boy; I’ll have to hone my sewing skills on “jams” for him before I set to tackle non-hooker clothing for baby girl.
I have booby dresses and non-booby dresses, and I’m a BIG girl.
What’s wrong with a shirt dress with all the buttons done up, or the aforementioned triangle of cloth at the neckline.
She broke the rule, you can argue about whether it’s a stupid rule or not, but it’s still a rule.
Since I’m not into disrespecting other people’s beliefs, I brought a pashmina and a long sarong with me in my bag when I planned to visit churchs in Italy or Spain, pashmina over my shoulders, sarong around the waist to make me decent.
Irishfella had those tousers that zip into shorts, so he brought the legs in his bag. They weighed nothing, take up next to no room, and smooth over the cracks of cultural misunderstanding.