Why Won't My Kid Wear a Coat? Or Pants?
I mean, it's really cold out, WTF.
Yesterday morning, at 6:20am, I awoke to see my 11-year-old getting ready for school in a T-shirt and shorts. Reader, it was 30 degrees out and windy. I must have given him my best “what the f*ck are you wearing” frown, because he turned to me and said:
11yo: Mom, do I need to wear pants?
Me: Yes, I think you’ll be more comfortable in pants. It’s cold and windy out.
11yo [rummaging through drawers]: Hmm. Can I wear the same pants I wore yesterday and the day before? They don’t smell and they don’t have stains.
Me: No, two days in a row is enough. Please wear one of the other two pairs of pants you just got that are clean.
11yo: But I don’t like them.
Me: You tried them on two weeks ago and said you liked them and I said “Are you sure? Because I don’t want to buy them and for you to decide in two weeks that you don’t like them,” and you said “No, I definitely like them.”
11yo: Well, now I don’t. They have a seam near the knees. I hate that!
Me: Well, you need to wear pants and those are your only clean ones.
Eventually, by some miracle, my son made it out the door in pants. No coat, though. One fight with my child before 6:30am is all I need, thank you very much.
Seriously though — why do so many kids hate wearing coats and pants? This sh*t is so trendy, McSweeney’s just published a parody of it literally yesterday.
Of course, there are a number of reasons kids refuse to wear the clothes we want them to wear. Rebellion being one. When kids feel we’re not giving them enough autonomy, they may try to steal some by declining to do what we ask. Hello, teen years!
But in today’s newsletter, I want to focus on another big driver of clothes-related ennui: Sensory processing.
My son has always been a sensory kid. By which I mean, his sensory preferences are intense and a bit odd. He can’t be within five feet of the smell of a banana, yet loves lemon juice. He will never, ever wear denim (and don’t put him within ten feet of wool). He loves being spun around in circles. Chewing gum calms him down.
I am pretty sure that his sensory differences — which he’s exhibited since he was a toddler — are responsible for his clothing woes, but for confirmation, I called occupational therapist Laura Petix, a.k.a. “The OT Butterfly,” who works with children with sensory issues.
Yes, Petix said, my son’s complaints sound like they’re rooted in sensory sensitivity. Here’s why kids are so particular about clothes and what you can do to help them dress appropriately.
Believe them.
Even if the pants you’ve bought your kid are what you consider the comfiest, coziest pants in the world, your kid isn’t lying when he tells you they’re awful. “It can feel like they're exaggerating, or trying to run the show,” Petix explained, but your kid’s reactions are an accurate reflection of how their nervous system is responding.
As Petix told me, there are eight sensory systems in the body — sight (visual), taste (gustatory), touch (tactile), hearing (auditory), smell (olfactory), vestibular (balance), proprioceptive (movement) and interoceptive (internal). But touch, she explained, is the system that’s often most affected in sensory kids.
“We have touch receptors all over our skin, on all every single inch of our body,” Petix said. When kids are sensitive to touch, “things like the way that clothes fit, the way that seams touch your toes, the fabric that's on your skin — all of that can be very triggering.”
When your kid says that a certain piece of clothing is uncomfortable, they really are perceiving it as such. In a small landmark study from 1999, researchers exposed children — those with sensory processing issues, and those without — to various sensations. As they did, the researchers measured changes in the electrical characteristics of the kids’ skin. A larger electrodermal response, as it’s called, is a good proxy for an increased stress response. (The electrical characteristics of skin change when someone starts sweating, for instance.)
The researchers found that the children with sensory processing issues — perhaps they were kids who despised knee seams — had larger electrodermal responses than the other kids did, which suggests that they really were experiencing more distress. Also, although the kids with sensory issues acclimated to the sensations they experienced over time, reacting less and less, their responses remained much higher than those of the non-sensory kids.
Here’s a graph showing the average electrodermal responses of non-sensory kids to the sensations:
Here’s a graph showing the much bigger responses by the sensory kids:
And here’s a graph showing both groups’ responses over time (the sensory kids’ responses are indicated by the dotted line, and the non-sensory kids with the solid one):
Petix emphasized that our kids’ clothing sensitivities aren’t always logical, at least to us. Why, for instance, should coats be a problem, since they don’t even touch the skin? Well, Petix said, coats do still put pressure on the skin. And some kids may not like how their shirt sleeves bunch up underneath their coats. The gist I got from Petix is that it’s futile to try to make sense of our kids’ preferences, because they exist for so many reasons, and different kids can have different triggers. Petix said that her sensorily-sensitive daughter gleefully wears glittery itchy dresses but can’t stand long-sleeved shirts, which also makes absolutely no sense (to me).
Other senses can play a role in clothing woes, too. For instance, my son hates feeling hot. He’d rather be freezing cold, which I personally find insane. But given that preference, is it that surprising that he reaches for T-shirts in the middle of winter? He has told me that his school classrooms are kept extremely warm, so perhaps he just wants to be comfortable during class and doesn’t mind catching a bit of a chill during recess.
So should we let our kids go without coats or force them to them bundle up? Is there anything we can do to ease our kids’ touch sensitivity? I asked Petix these questions, and she had four excellent suggestions.