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Modifying Dress Codes

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Modifying Dress Codes for a Healthier Upbringing During the adolescent years, kids go through some of the toughest and most confusing stages of their life. These years are a time for self-discovery, for learning, and for growing up to become the future of our world. The pressure to grow into something that is accepted and praised by society can be one of the hardest challenges to overcome. The ideas that society enforce regarding beauty standards and gender norms can be some of the most damaging. Young boys grow up believing that crying is a weakness, that any form of emotion is weakness, and it teaches them to bottle up their feelings and creates an unhealthy upbringing. Young women grow up believing that a pretty face is everything. They …show more content…

Diane Ehrensaft, a woman who writes about gender and is a psychologist says“This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with. A lot of youths say they won’t be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field.” Adults, she added, “become the gender police through dress codes.” (NY TIMES 2009) Take for example a young girl named Aniya Wolf, who was kicked out of prom for wearing a tux. When she showed up for the event with her girlfriend, she was pulled out of line and asked by her principal to leave. She told TODAY reporter, "I felt humiliated, getting kicked out of prom. I wasn't going to hurt anybody with a suit." She was also documented by TODAY saying "It is an attack on my sexual orientation, It's saying, 'We don't want you in our prom. You're a freak of nature.'" (TODAY 2016) For Aniya, this was a very damaging event in her life. She had to experience how it feels to be cast out and shamed for something that makes her different than some of her other classmates. To experience such limitations on expressing oneself, each of these kids in our generation are at risk of dealing with negative effects on their mental health. To deal with the limitations on expressing oneself from peers is one thing but to be limited by adults who these kids are taught to look up to can be extremely confusing and cause a significant level of shame that is not only detrimental to their self-esteem but completely unnecessary. Such strict and unreasonable dress code regulations effectively create several levels of negative impacts on the wellbeing of the youth of our generation while setting back progress in our society to achieve more open-mindedness in the years to

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