Clothing Struggles

My four year old son H. put on his winter coat on both Monday and Tuesday morning this week even though, for a mid-fall morning, it was definitely too warm to wear much besides a sweatshirt.

He pushed the puffy sleeves of the coat up to his elbows after he put it on. He looked at me and said Vest. I didn’t correct him. Having the sleeves rolled up seemed like it would make it hard for him to bend his elbows, but he was happy. Vest he said again. I was ecstatic. It was the first time he wore a winter coat since March of 2021. 

Clothing Battles

 He wore a coat during the winter of 2020-21 but refused to wear one all of last winter. In fact, he refused to wear any pairs of long pants and long sleeve shirts last winter too. 

We still went outside though, even when it was January. He just wore knee socks with his shorts and a winter vest with his bare arms and short sleeve t-shirts. Sometimes he would wear two vests.  On cold days, he allowed us to put his baby blanket over his shoulders and pin it with a safety pin, like a cloak. He wouldn’t wear gloves or a winter hat even though we had plenty that had been his or his older brother’s. He just tucked his hands into his cloak or into the pockets of his jacket.

 He would wear a baseball cap, just like he wears in the house and outside everyday.

At one point last January, I fashioned wrist cuffs out of the leg part of a pair of old socks of mine so that he could have some lower arm protection. I was happy when he accepted the idea of wearing them, but after 10 minutes he took them off and wouldn’t wear them again. They honestly didn’t do much. The bottom part of adult female  human legs are still much larger in circumference than a three year old boy’s wrists. They were kind of baggy on his arms and sort of slouched down. 

Due to his attire, we didn’t take him out much to play on very snowy or windy days or at night when the sun wasn’t out. We did go outside and play on sunny winter days. His blanket cloak provided protection from the elements as did the two winters vests he took to wearing. 

It’s not that we didn’t try to get him to wear warmer clothes. He actually wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt on our camping trips the previous summer before this all started. I have a picture of him on July 4th, 2021 wearing pants and a sweatshirt. However, by the time fall came, he would only wear shorts. The last time we remembered him wearing any sleeves at all was when he wore a sweatshirt last year to our town’s Halloween parade, on October 17th of 2021.

By the time November came, I decided that his daily shorts and short sleeve shirt with a vest look was not tenable. I sat him down one afternoon and put a set of blue long underwear on him and put his shorts and shirt on over the set.  I thought he might enjoy the warmth and the compression. Plus, the air was definitely getting colder and I wanted to go for a bike ride.

He did not enjoy wearing the long underwear set.  He cried the entire time we were outside. He was beside himself with sadness. He cried and cried. He cried even when we returned home and went back inside. He didn’t seem to acclimate ever during the hour while he was in the long underwear shirt and pants. So when we came back inside, I helped him take off his clothes and we put back on his signature short sleeve shirt and beige shorts without anything underneath. 

At the time his language skills were few and far between. He was still 3 but edging towards 4 years old.

 That winter we tried a few more times to get him to wear sleeves and pants but each time it was upsetting for him. So we stopped trying for a while.

It was hard for him to wear clothes but it was hard for me too for him not to wear clothes. 

Part of the problem felt real and important to his safety and part of the problem felt put upon by social norms. The real part of his clothing dilemma was that clothes are necessary to protect the human body from adverse conditions. H. ‘s dress seemed to keep him warm enough as long as he didn’t cover himself in snow (which he didn’t seem interested in doing) or stay outside for an extended period of time.

The manufactured part was constant pressure I felt from society to force him to comply with social dress norms, even though he seemed warm and happy in his vests and blanket. You can’t imagine the number of times I heard unsolicited advice to the extent of, “You need to put some clothes on that boy,” when I was out in public. I would check him for coldness many times an hour when we were out. I would put my hands on his head and fingers and they always felt warm to the touch.

People we knew were curious as to why we chose to not participate in cold weather activities sometimes. I had trouble explaining exactly why I couldn’t just get him to wear a coat.  I had a fairly difficult conversation about why I couldn’t get H. to wear winter clothes and why I didn’t think the person in question would be able to just convince him to wear a coat. It started feeling pretty heavy. I felt it all weigh on me.

 Luckily, the preschool that he attended last winter did not have an outdoor play area so I did not experience the pressure of having to explain why he could not dress like all the other children in their winter clothes. However, this is not true at the preschool he attends now, where they have a playground and outside area that they will be visiting most days of the school year. So it is very lucky for me that recently he has become more open to the prospect of wearing cold weather clothes.

In order to relive some of my clothing stress and to figure out if I was doing right by my child, I spent time researching solutions. I learned that quite a few families have similar dilemmas. Many websites I found suggested that I just reason with my child about why they had to wear winter clothes. I found suggestions of fun games we could play where he would just try on one item at a time. I found this hard to do since H., for all intents and purposes, was non-verbal at the time and seemed to get really upset when he had to wear anything he didn’t want to wear. It was difficult to have these types of discussions since I did not know if he was understanding what I was saying. I did learn other helpful information though.

 In researching clothing aversions,  I learned that there are several reasons some children don’t want to wear warm clothes in the winter. First, some children find certain clothing too stimulating and do not like the way it feels on their skin. This lead me to seek up there services of an occupational therapists to deal with these issues.

Secondly, I learned something very interesting that helped me feel better about H.’s preferences in his dress.  It is that children have more brown fat than adults do and they may not feel the cold air as much as adults do. When I read this article from the New York Times last winter, it made me feel a lot better about sending him outside in his minimalist winter attire.

Making Progress

H. started attending occupational therapy last spring, as soon as one became available, partially for his clothing aversion. His occupational therapist persuaded me to attempt to get him to try other clothing than his usual even for just a minute or two during times when it wasn’t essential that he wear the items in question. Then we would be able to see if he would be open to it. Unfortunately, the temperature had already started to heat up by the time he started seeing his occupational therapist so we had fewer opportunities to attempt putting on a coat. There were other opportunities to try new clothing though.

Last June, when it was time for him to participate in his preschool’s end of the year celebration, it seemed the perfect opportunity to see if he would wear a button down shirt. I picked out the shirt choices. I don’t remember if H. picked one or we picked one for him. Then my husband put the shirt on H. He was very sad, but probably not as sad as he had been the previous fall when I put long underwear on him. He crossed his arms and was unhappy visiting his teachers at his walk-thru “graduation” celebration. But then a funny thing happened. He chose to wear the button down shirt until the end of the day. Then as soon as that shirt was laundered and put into his drawer again, he wanted to wear it every day over his regular t-shirts. He started to call it his Vest. We all started to refer to it as his Summer Vest to distinguish it from the winter vest that he continued to wear up until the end of spring. 

People would say I see he is not wearing a winter vest anymore. We would say, Oh, he is wearing his summer vest now.

As summer wore on, he even stopped wearing his t-shirts underneath the button down shirts while he was wearing them. In fact, I bought him more button down shirts online, first for him to wear as a “vest” then to just wear on their own. Now he has two favorite looks. He likes to wear certain favorite t-shirts with beige or jean shorts OR he likes to wear one of his several button down shirts with beige or jean shorts. He even wears his button down shirts to bed.

We have now tried this clothing introduction method, as I will call it, with a few different clothing items. The process goes like this: 1) We show him the item or even let him choose between two or three different things, like a few different long sleeve shirts. 2) Then we will help him put the item on. 3) Then usually he is upset for ten or twenty minutes. During this time he needs and gets a lot of hugs. 4) Eventually, his mood will lighten and he will start having fun again even though he is wearing something he originally had no designs on wearing.

This fall he has already worn one particular long sleeve shirt at least three times now. The first time was out of necessity, because we were camping in a cabin and the temperature dipped into unseasonably cold territory. That’s when we learned that this method could work.  Then two times by choice.  He even CHOSE to wear that same long sleeve shirt for his school photo this year.

In terms of other progress, we also have convinced him to wear a zip-up sweatshirt this fall a few times using this method. He does always roll up his sleeves though.Beggars can’t be choosers. 

We have also been trying other, more subtle methods to get him to open to the possibility of wearing cold weather clothes.

One thing I have done is I bought several packages of the Command 3M hooks and put them out around the living room and TV room. On the hooks, I put different cold weather clothes that H. could choose to try.

 This is where he found his winter coat that he put on for the first time on Monday morning. I was actually about to give up hope on the hook experiment.I had put the hooks up over a month ago and he seemed to have little interest in investigating and trying on those items.  But today, it worked so really what do I know?

 Strangely enough though, in the past month or so, he has been trying on a certain fleece sweatshirt of mine when I have left it on the coach and wearing it around for a while. So maybe we are on the cusp of a new phase.

He has also tried on a Buzz-Lightyear costume a few times this fall that he wore two Halloweens ago. I had put it  in a pile of items I was contemplating giving away since I did not think he had any interest in ever wearing it again. Then he put it on of his own volition and played around wearing it a few times.

Perhaps by doing these things, he is trying to tell me “Mom, don’t give up. You are on the right track.”

It’s funny because the winter coat that he wore on Monday was the same one his older brother wore in the picture from March of 2021, the last recorded time that we remember him wearing a winter coat.  We have been through an entire generation of clothes already.

I am writing this piece today because I am so happy about the progress, but also to let you know a little bit about what a process this clothing situation has been. H. is a cute boy with a charming personality He brings joy to those who meet him. We love him dearly. We won’t trade him for anything in the world. He does have a lot of quirks though. He is developmentally delayed and sometimes it can feel hard when he does not act or behave like his peers.

Sometimes, I talk to other people and they are surprised at the amount of speech and occupational therapy H. gets.

He sees both a speech therapist and an occupational therapist weekly outside of school. I take him to an office through our health care provider for those visits. He also sees an itinerant occupational therapist, speech therapist and special education teacher weekly at his regular preschool school. He works really hard with those specialists. We try really hard at home to help him with his development.

Until we noticed that H. had these delays, I did not appreciate the outside time commitment that other people participated in to help their children learn.

My older son P. did not have these delays so we didn’t go through this all with him. At the same time though, I felt such a rush of pure joy when I saw H. put on the coat on Monday. I would not have appreciated such a small act with my older son P. because that was not something that he ever struggled with.

That is the beauty of sharing my stories with you through this blog. I get to share pieces of my life with you. By reading my blog, you learn more about my life. I think in life, stories are essential. I enjoy hearing about other people’s stories and experiences. If you have a blog, I hope you will continue sharing with your readers. If you don’t have a blog, remember that sharing our stories has power and value.

How to Subscribe to this blog!