Why Kids Assign Special ‘Attributes’ To Clothes And Toys: A Parent’s Unexpected Lesson
Last month, we were cleaning out the back corner of our garage to make room for the rickety used playset my husband picked up off Facebook Marketplace. The air smelled like stale motor oil and half a box of sidewalk chalk that melted two summers ago, and my two kids, 7-year-old Jax and 5-year-old Lila, were digging through a pile of old junk my brother left when he moved three years ago. That’s when Jax pulled it out: a scuffed white hard hat with a faded donut shop sticker on the front.
He plopped it on his head, adjusted it so it slid down over one eyebrow, and announced, “Now I have the construction worker attribute.” I was halfway through hauling an old bag of potting soil to the trash and joked that great, because that 20-pound cinder block by the fence had to move. “It’s too heavy for me to carry,” I said. Jax puffed out his chest, tapped the hard hat, and walked over. He wrapped both arms around it and lifted it straight up, carrying it all the way to the new playset spot before dropping it with a thud. I stared. I’d been trying to work up the energy to move that thing for 20 minutes.
Then Lila demanded a turn. She shoved her sparkly tutu out of the way, pulled the hard hat onto her head (it fell over her whole face, so she held it up with one hand) and said she was now a construction worker too, so she could fix the wobbly step on our back porch. She spent the next hour hammering at the loose nail with a plastic kid hammer, chattering about code inspections and load beams. By dinner, the rule was clear: anyone wearing the hard hat automatically gets all the skills, strength, and authority of a construction worker, no exceptions.
I’d written off this little bit of kid logic as just another weird thing kids come up with, until a few days later when I volunteered during center time in Jax’s first grade class. I was helping run the dress-up bin, and I noticed the same pattern playing out. The quiet kid who never raises his hand was wearing the frayed old fireman coat, and suddenly he was barking clear orders to the other kids about how to put out the block “fire” in the corner. A girl who’d been upset about missing her mom 10 minutes earlier put on the plastic teacher glasses and started leading circle time, all trace of her tears gone. Whoever put on a costume didn’t just pretend to be that person — they got that person’s attributes.
I’ve always thought of dress-up play as just a fun way to fill time, and I’ve made a habit of cleaning out the overflowing dress-up bin once a year, donating most of the ratty old pieces to keep clutter down. I’ve even said, more than once, “Why do you need a special hat? You can just pretend you’re a construction worker with a cereal box on your head.” The kids always told me it wasn’t the same, and I never really believed them. Now I get it. Little kids don’t think in abstract terms the way adults do. It’s hard for a 5-year-old to just decide “I’m brave” or “I’m strong” out of thin air. But a hard hat? That’s a concrete thing that holds that attribute for them. It’s not magic, it’s just how their developing brains work.
It turns out this trick works for all kinds of stuff, not just backyard play. Last week Lila had to get a flu shot, and she’d been crying about it for two days because she was scared of needles. I remembered the hard hat rule, and I grabbed her favorite pink sparkly cowgirl hat off the hook by the door. “This hat gives you the brave cowgirl attribute,” I told her. “It makes your arm stay still and it keeps the owie from feeling too bad.” She put it on, held her arm out for the nurse, and didn’t shed a single tear. She even told the nurse about the attribute, which made the nurse laugh.
There are a couple of small, easy things this has changed for me as a parent, and they’re things any parent or teacher can try. First, I stopped clearing out the dress-up bin so aggressively. Instead of only keeping fancy character costumes, I pick up cheap, plain used props at the thrift store: old work boots, a faded doctor’s coat, an empty canvas messenger bag that can be a mail bag or a teacher bag, an extra hard hat just like ours. These plain props work better than branded costumes anyway, because kids can assign any attribute they want to them, instead of being stuck being just Spider-Man or Elsa.
Second, I started using this attribute trick when my kids are stuck on something hard. If Jax is nervous about a math test, I let him borrow my old running hat and tell him it gives him the focused runner attribute, since he associates that hat with me finishing 5Ks, something he thinks is super cool. If Lila is struggling to tie her shoes and says she’s too little to do it, she can put on the construction hard hat for the strong, capable attribute. It takes 10 seconds, it doesn’t cost anything, and it works way more often than it doesn’t.
It doesn’t work every time, of course. Some days the hard hat is just a hard hat, and Lila will still cry about a shot even with her cowgirl hat on. That’s fine. It’s just a tool, not a fix for everything.
Right now, the hard hat is sitting under the slide in the backyard, where someone left it yesterday after building a fort out of fallen branches. Our dress-up bin still overflows onto the floor of the play room, and I don’t mind that as much as I used to. I still have a lot to learn from the way my kids see the world, and this was one of those little lessons that sticks. If a scuffed old hat can give my kid the courage to try something they thought they couldn’t do, a little clutter is a small price to pay. I’m still not 100% sure where the word “attribute” even came from, but I’m not going to question a system that works.
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