When Your Son Wants Pink Glitter Boots: What I Learned Saying Yes
The Target shoe aisle smelled like new rubber and popcorn from the food court, it was 92 degrees in mid-August, and my 8-year-old son Jax was supposed to be picking out new rain boots for third grade recess. We’d already grabbed jeans, a new Minecraft-covered backpack, and fought off my 11-year-old daughter’s plea for $15 lip gloss, so I was ready to check out and get home to cold lemonade. Jax dragged his feet past the stack of plain black rain boots, past the blue dinosaur print ones he’d liked last year, and stopped short in front of the endcap marked “Girls’ Styles.” He tugged my wrist. “Mom. Those. I want those.”
They were hot pink, coated in silver glitter that shed a little even through the box, with tiny rubber unicorn horns sticking up off the toe. I opened my mouth to say the automatic thing: “Don’t you want the dinosaur ones? Those are way cooler.” But I caught myself. Two years before, he’d begged for a unicorn backpack for first grade, and I’d talked him into a blue space one instead. That backpack hung in our closet unused the entire year, he brought the old dinosaur one every day, and I still felt that little twinge of guilt when I saw it.
I wiped sweat off my neck and leaned down. “Why those?” I asked. “Mia in my class has a pair,” he said, kicking a loose bottle of shoe polish on the floor. “She said they keep your feet way drier than the plain ones. And the glitter shines when I walk to the bus. The horns are cool.” No big statement, no dramatic identity crisis, just a kid who liked a pair of boots.
I hesitated. I thought about the side comments from other parents at the bus stop. I thought about kids teasing him on the playground. I thought about what my own dad would have said when I was a kid, about boys not wearing pink. I checked the price tag: $27.99, exactly the same as the dinosaur boots. They had his size. I tossed the box in the cart.
The checkout line was when it got awkward. The older woman behind me leaned over to look in the cart. “Aren’t those the prettiest boots?” she said. “For your little girl?” “No,” I said, smiling as tight as I could. “They’re for my son.” She blinked, stepped back a little, and didn’t say anything else. I felt my face heat up, and I almost pulled the box out and swapped it for the dinosaurs right there. But Jax was already bouncing on his heels, turning the box over to look at the unicorns again, and I kept my mouth shut.
The first day of school, he pulled those boots on before I even asked, laced them up himself, and ran out to the bus stop like they were the most normal pair of boots in the world. That first week, we had three straight days of afternoon rain, so he wore them every day. I held my breath when he got off the bus the first day, waiting for him to say someone had been mean. He dropped his backpack, grabbed a granola bar, and said “Tyler said these are girl boots. I told him boots don’t have genders, and my feet are dry and his sneakers are soaked, so mine are better.” Then he ran outside to climb the tree in the front yard.
No tears, no big drama. By the end of the first month, three different moms from his class texted me asking for the link to the boots, after their sons came home asking for their own.
I’ve thought a lot about that trip to Target since then, because the question “would you buy these boots for your son?” gets asked a lot in parent groups I’m in, and almost all the answers are split. Half say of course, why wouldn’t you, and the other half say it’s asking for trouble, why put your kid through teasing for a pair of boots.
What I’ve realized is that the trouble most of us are worried about is our trouble, not our kid’s. I was the one who cared that they were in the girls’ section. I was the one who cared what the stranger at Target thought. Jax just cared that they sparkled and kept his feet dry. My discomfort with other people’s opinions wasn’t a good enough reason to tell him no.
There’s a simple little trick I’ve started using now when something like this comes up, and it works for me: before I say no, I ask myself one question. Does this hurt anyone? Is he going to break something, or get hurt, or hurt someone else by wearing these boots? No. If the answer is no, that’s the default for saying yes, not the other way around. I used to do it backwards: default to no because it’s easier, because it avoids the awkward small talk with strangers. But that default means I’m teaching him that other people’s comfort matters more than his own wants.
The other thing I do differently now is I don’t put my fear of teasing on him before it happens. I don’t say “kids are going to make fun of you” because that makes him feel like he’s doing something wrong before anyone even says anything. Instead, I just say “If anyone says something rude to you, I’ve got your back, and we can practice what to say together if you want.” It’s concrete, it doesn’t shame him, and it lets him know he’s not alone if it does get hard. It doesn’t create a problem that wasn’t there in the first place, either. In Jax’s case, the teasing was over in 30 seconds, and that was that.
It’s November now, and the boots have a big scuff on the left toe from when Jax tried to jump over the creek at the park. Most of the glitter is flaked off the soles, and the unicorn horns are a little bent. He still pulls them on every time the forecast says rain.
I don’t have this all figured out. Next year he might decide he hates pink and glitter and only wants all black everything, and that’s fine too. This wasn’t about making a big political statement or raising some kind of poster child. It was just about a kid wanting a pair of boots. Right now, what works is saying yes more than I say no, when the only thing I’m worried about is what other people might think. That’s enough for me, for now.
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