My Husband Is Forbidding My Daughter’s Risqué Halloween Costume. It’s Time for the Nuclear Option.
Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
Halloween is nearly two months away, but there’s already trouble brewing over my 13-year-old daughter, “Shelby’s” choice of costume.
Shelby wants to go as a sexy nurse. My husband is vehemently against it and has told her that she is “not going out dressed as a slut.” The costume is a little on the skimpy side, but it’s not THAT revealing. And our daughter is no longer a child. I don’t see the harm in this sort of thing for a single evening. Should I try and talk some sense into my husband, or just tell Shelby to go out dressed as something else, wear her nurse costume underneath, and take off the dad-approved one once she’s away from the house?
Your daughter is a child. Sexy nurse is a jokey-sexy costume for an adult (not that I like it much for a grown woman, either). Your child is most definitely not an adult, and going along with her pretending to be one is a very bad idea. If she wants to dress as a nurse, that’s another matter entirely. And if she protests that dressing as a nurse is boring, brainstorm with her (Frankenstein’s monster nurse? Demon or zombie nurse? Nurse-alien? Nurse-robot? Half-nurse, half-dragon? K-pop nurse?).
But also: No matter how she is dressed, she is not “dressed as a slut.”
In other words: You and your husband are both wrong.
But as disgusted as I am by what your husband said, you’re wronger than he is. Permitting (much less encouraging) your 13-year-old child to wear a “sexy nurse” costume sexualizes her as much as her dad’s invoking the word “slut” does—and your willingness to suggest that she sneak out in this costume, defying to and lying to her other parent, is appalling. It’s bad parenting and bad partnering.
Based on what you’ve said here, I have a hunch that this dispute between you and your husband is but the tip of the iceberg. There are going to be much rougher times ahead, as your daughter actually does leave childhood behind and enters her later teens and beyond, but remains in need of her parents’ good counsel and support. I suggest you and your husband put some work into your marriage, at the very least enough so that you can be there for her when she needs you.
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