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I have two adult sons and they are very open about liking girly-girls. I'm good with that.
I would have loved to have a girly-girl daughter. I wouldn't understand a girl who always wanted to dress like a boy, play with boy toys, etc. But at 5 years old, I wouldn't be too concerned. Since the mother has to dress and groom the child there's nothing wrong with her making the child a bit more girly. I doubt a 5 year old cares if she has bows in her hair or not.
What is dressing like a boy and playing with "boy toys"? Pants? Balls? Oh no! Horrors! Not every girl wants a tutu and Barbies. Doesn't make them less of a girl.
5 year olds can definitely have opinions as to how they'd prefer to dress. Girls as well as boys.
I think OP is finding issues were there are none. The kid is 5. Most 5 year old wear whatever their parents buy. Chances are a girly girl mom would buy girly girl clothes for her daughter till her daughter gets old enough to have an opinion. There is nothing wrong with a little girl being a tomboy or being girly. None of these prevents a child from being a child.
I was neither a tomboy not girly growing up. I did wear a dress every day from age 4 till I graduated from high school because I wore school uniforms. But at home, I wore whatever was handy. My girls today also dress middle the road - not girly and not tomboyish. They may have opinions but still too young to count too much in terms of what I buy. For school (by the way. I hate that public schools the US don't wear uniforms) they wear mostly leggings, sometimes skorts and tops and sneakers. One daughter would prefer to wear dresses every day but we don't have that many dresses and I just don't think dresses are super convenient for elementary school, recess, monkey bars which they love, PE etc. So we compromised and she gets to pick dresses to wear most weekends.
I think OP is finding issues were there are none. The kid is 5. Most 5 year old wear whatever their parents buy. Chances are a girly girl mom would buy girly girl clothes for her daughter till her daughter gets old enough to have an opinion. There is nothing wrong with a little girl being a tomboy or being girly. None of these prevents a child from being a child.
I was neither a tomboy not girly growing up. I did wear a dress every day from age 4 till I graduated from high school because I wore school uniforms. But at home, I wore whatever was handy. My girls today also dress middle the road - not girly and not tomboyish. They may have opinions but still too young to count too much in terms of what I buy. For school (by the way. I hate that public schools the US don't wear uniforms) they wear mostly leggings, sometimes skorts and tops and sneakers. One daughter would prefer to wear dresses every day but we don't have that many dresses and I just don't think dresses are super convenient for elementary school, recess, monkey bars which they love, PE etc. So we compromised and she gets to pick dresses to wear most weekends.
No...no. Not any of my kids. Bu 5 they had strong preferences, all of them. Its normal for them to...to me its a little odd if they don't. My only daughter had strong preferences by 5. My son had sensory preferences by 5 (not style but comfort). So did my step kids and foster kids.
Did your cousin marry-down? His wife sounds like she's from a social class beneath yours. The lower one goes on the Social Totem Pole, the more exaggerated gender issues become, and the more importance is attached to them. Same with IQ: dumb people obsess over "manhood" and "femininity", while people at the top are more androgynous.
But why is everybody beating around the bush, here? I think it's always been assumed, in less-than-ascendant social strata, that being a tomboy will lead to lesbianism. The same people who obsess over gender-specific behavior, tend to obsess over sexual preference. In your cousin-in-law's tiny brain, "encouraging" her daughter to be a "girly-girl" will prevent her growing into a - well - a - um... you know...
In reality, it seems that making children uncomfortable with their gender expression (or lack of it), tends to push them off the Bisexual Spectrum (where most people remain), and into full-blown same-gender preference. Calling a little boy "sissy" is the best way to be SURE he won't want girls, when he gets older. Making a boy hate his own "femininity" seems to make "feminine" qualities repulsive to him, while making "masculine" qualities, in others, attractive to him. Making a girl hate her own "masculine" traits, may cause her to be repulsed by "masculinity" in men, and attracted to the "femininity" of women. That's how self-hate seems to work.
And while it's far harder to push a girl off the Bisexual Spectrum, FORCING her to priss around in bows and dresses, when all she wants is to play on the beach, might just do the trick. She may come to detest femininity, and the 'female role'.
The mother has a problem, not the little girl. Children aren't fashion conscience at five-years-old. They don't understand "girlie-girl". They only understand running, jumping and having fun.
I suspect that Gracie is dealing with some deep secrets about herself.
I was a tomboy. I got married to a man an' everythin'.
Ah for the days before tv and the internet - and social engineering programs in the schools - telling our children (and their parents) who and what they should be or want to be and how they should dress. It used to be that kids didn't have a clue what was 'in fashion' and I am pretty sure most were not as opinionated about it at age 4 or 5 as they are today when they are exposed to it ... nay, bombarded by it .. day after day. We simply had a choice of what was in our dresser drawers or closets - from what our mothers put there or what the school demanded we wear (uniforms - bring them back!) - and there were far fewer items there to choose from anyway, unlike today.
That said, thank goodness for the prevalence of pants for little girls too these days (in my day, I had very few pairs of pants - unless my mother made them for me they just were not really offered in the Sears catalogue on a regular basis). VERY practical for little ones especially, of either gender - unless you just have children to display them sitting quietly in some corner like mannequins or to parade them on a fashion runway stage?
The mother of this child under discussion though is the one with the problem, not the child. Whether that problem is that she fears her little (probably very normal active) child is going to be a lesbian (I don't think any mother worried about that when I was a child and it never occurred to me to worry about it when my kids were young either) or because she herself is just neurotic, I don't know - but it is sad that she chooses to fight her child so much on this very silly issue.
I often find myself smiling when I see a mother with a child or two in tow who has obviously permitted said child to dress him or herself .. and that child has chosen all manner of mismatched clothing (up to and including partial Halloween costumes in months like May or June) ... and I have even seen a boy wearing a pink tutu with jeans underneath and a cowboy hat. I think I was probably a bit more rigid than that with my kids - and sometimes think that I should not have been - they all grew up just fine with the gender they were assigned at birth - as did I (and I was definitely not the 'dolls' and frills kind of girl, never have been, never will be but I am not a boy either and never thought I was or wanted to be).
My daughter is a tomboy and I just accepted it. She isn't interested in dolls. She destroyed the ones that we gave her, so we stopped buying them. She'd rather play video games or climb trees outdoors.
My mom had a daughter who was all Gothic, a daughter who was a tomboy and a daughter who was girly. She didn't really try to mold any of us so she probably also scratches her head sometimes as to how we all came out so differently. In fact, not too long ago I asked my mom, "Why did you let me wear this terrible outfit?" She said, "If I told you not to you would've argued with me!"
Anyway, I was the tomboy of the three and when I was younger, my mom had us wear dresses on special occasions but after elementary school, I would pretty much wear what I wanted. I hated Barbies so my mom never bought them. I played outside every single moment that I could. I played ball. I climbed trees. And all these years later, I still know nothing about make-up.
I do tell my husband that if we have a kid, and if she's a girly girl, I will be lost. I do think some parents think of their kids as mini versions of themselves and I think only those who do would be disappointed or trying to sway their kid one way or another.
Ah for the days before tv and the internet - and social engineering programs in the schools - telling our children (and their parents) who and what they should be or want to be and how they should dress. It used to be that kids didn't have a clue what was 'in fashion' and I am pretty sure most were not as opinionated about it at age 4 or 5 as they are today when they are exposed to it ... nay, bombarded by it .. day after day. We simply had a choice of what was in our dresser drawers or closets - from what our mothers put there or what the school demanded we wear (uniforms - bring them back!) - and there were far fewer items there to choose from anyway, unlike today.
Wrong! Wearing dresses, btw, has nothing to do with what is in fashion for preschoolers. I am a grandmother whose kids were born in the early 1970s. Both of them had preferences in clothing before they were 5. I also taught preschool and girls who were between 3 and 5 seemed to prefer dresses and skirts because they thought they were pretty or because (like my dd) they could twirl and dance and the skirts and dresses blossomed out. They often grew out of this preference at 6 or 7, but not always. As for boys, they seem to love comfort and things they could play in the mud in. Now my dd also loved to play in the mud and sand, but the girls didn't think about not getting their dresses dirty.
Also, I am in my 70s and when I was that age, I wore dresses sometimes and pants sometimes depending on the activity. Still, I had a neighbor whose children were always in white dresses. They somehow managed to come over and play in my sandbox without ever getting those pretty frilly dresses dirty - I have no idea how they managed it.
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