5-Year-Old's Costume Stirs Controversy
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He went to school dressed up as a girl for Halloween. But it wasn't students who made fun of him – it was parents.
Mom talks about incident on 'Today'
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Jump in the Mystery Machine, boys and girls, because one mom is trying to figure out why her son's Halloween costume – Daphne from "Scooby-Doo" -- caused such a national uproar.
The Kansas City-area mom identified as "Sarah" says her 5-year-old son loves Scooby-Doo and initially wanted to dress as Daphne, but reconsidered because he was afraid people would laugh at him. Sarah says she assured him no one would make fun of him, but writes that she was taken aback when mothers at his Christian preschool posed "noisy, probing questions" about his costume, KBMC.com reports.
In fact, she says it wasn't her son's classmates who had a problem with the costume. "No child said a word to him that day in any sort of negative capacity," Sarah says on the "Today" show. She says that most parents were supportive, but when a few mothers criticized her, "I just sort of played it off. I didn't want to cause a big scene," she tells "Today," adding, "I didn't want to make a mistake in front of my son by reacting in a negative way."
Sarah says one mother told her that children are mean and she had opened her son up for ridicule. She writes, "My response to that: The only people that seem to have a problem with it is their mothers."
The negative reaction to her son's costume prompted Sarah to write about the incident on her Nerdy Apple Bottom blog.
"If you think that me allowing my son to be a female character for Halloween is somehow going to 'make' him gay then you are an idiot," she writes on her blog, adding, "If my daughter had dressed as Batman, no one would have thought twice about it. No one."
She writes that these mothers are guilty of bullying. "IT IS NOT OK TO BULLY," she writes on her blog. "Even if you wrap it up in a bow and call it 'concern.' Those women were trying to bully me. And my son. MY son."
Sarah, who writes that it was "heartbreaking" that her son was right to be worried about what people would say, adds, "My job as his mother is not to stifle that man that he will be, but to help him along his way. Mine is not to dictate what is 'normal' and what is not, but to help him become a good person."
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If he wanted to be dressed as Fred from Scooby Doo, THEN I'd be 'concerned'
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This is on BBC Breakfast and it's funny that most of those that were interviewed for their opinion, women tended to be supportive, while most men are worried he might end up "different" or as 3 men said "sissy".
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Some people just don't know how to handle such things. If the kid wants to dress up as a woman, I fail to see where the problem lies with that. Besides, regardless of the kid's sexual orientation, what freaking difference does it make?
