Clothing Challenges

As much as we love Emmy, it is no secret that she is one of our most challenging. Her stubbornness and fireball personality poses many parenting challenges. Our biggest one currently is that she hates to wear clothes. Its not that she wants to be naked. Its that most clothing feels bad to her. Tags are terrible, long sleeves feel too long, sweaters feel too furry, shoes feel to tight and pants always feel BAD! Well it's winter in Nebraska and pants aren't negotiable this time of year unless you want to freeze to death! We have been dealing with this for quite a while and I finally asked her pediatrician about it. He thought it was mostly behavioral since this behavior doesn't occur at daycare. He did give us the name of a counselor to see though. I went to the parent meeting and immediately felt judged! This lady had one child and I'm sure she did everything perfect because she wasn't above telling me I was doing almost everything wrong. She was disappointed in our lack of routine for getting ready in the morning, getting to bed and really everything else. I tried to gently remind her that the lack of routine had to do with things like us having jobs and 4 children but she felt like we could still do better. I went to talk about trying to get Emmy to wear pants without a crying screaming fit and spent most of the hour explaining/defending our bedtime routine. I left super frustrated but the catch was she hadn't even met Emmy yet. I set up our next appointment which Emmy would come to and then I figured that she would see that this 4 year old was a force to be reckoned with! At the next appointment Emmy came and of course acted like a complete angel. We again didn't get anything accomplished and I felt like it was a waste of time again. She did want us to try playing clothing BINGO and it sounded funny so we did. This might be the most inappropriate game we have played with our children to date. We had people throwing underwear over their clothing, striping off clothes to put tights on. Layering shirts over shirts over shirts. It was chaos and it was hilarious. Pretty sure that it didn't help with the clothing issue but it made us laugh. We only went to one more appointment with that lady before I stopped answering calls from the office and avoiding them forever. We just started letting Emmy wear about whatever she wanted even if she looked ridiculous and we all were happier.