My four-year-old son likes wearing dresses — I fear this means he is more fashionable than me

MY son Ezra is, in most ways, a typical fouryear-old boy. He loves to wake me up at an ungodly hour by bashing me around the head in what he calls playing but which feels uncomfortably close to assault. He loves using sticks for sword fights and hates having his hair washed. The only slightly untypical thing about Ezra is that for the last few weeks he has refused to wear his dinosaur print tops and checked shirts and has insisted on wearing dresses.

It is quite an experience walking the street with him — strangers will start smiling and he will get called “princess” and a “beautiful girl”. I laugh it off just as I smile when parents at the kindergarten gate joke about Ezra being gender fluid in his fashion tastes. Ezra’s identity will be up to him — and embracing it is all part of being a parent. But in truth I am uncomfortable about such comments because it feels like they are assigning adult concepts to childhood innocence.

My son’s two best friends are girls, who wear dresses, and he has a sister from whom he has inherited a dressing-up box filled with ballet outfits and princess costumes. I think the reason he is into dresses right now is simply because that’s what his mates and sister wear. There is something deeply moving about Ezra’s innocence, indifference and utter lack of self-consciousness about what he is wearing. Sometimes it takes seeing one’s little boy in a purple spotty dress to appreciate how much we adults assign genders to clothes. It wasn’t always like that. From the mid-16th century until the early 20th century, young boys in the Western world would wear gowns and dresses until they were about eight. It was not until the end of the First World War that parents began to dress children according to their sex.

Go online and you can find a rather cute photograph of a young Ernest Hemingway and his sister in identical white dresses and a young Franklin D Roosevelt with long hair in a floaty white dress. Given this rich precedence I suspect he is just doing what children have always done, which is to have fun by dressing up.

I am more than happy for my boy to wear a dress in London but I did have to insist that when we visit my family in Luton for Eid, he needs to wear a shirt and trousers — I don’t think they are quite ready for Ezra in a frock. Although, Harry Styles wore a Gucci dress for a Vogue magazine cover last year and it helped him win an award for the most stylish man of the year. And just this past weekend, I read in one of the Sunday papers that man skirts are the latest pandemic fashion trend. So what does Ezra’s dress phase mean? I fear it means that my four-year-old son is already more fashionable than his dad.

It was not until the end of the First World War that children were dressed according to their sex

IT IS Eid today. My children are growing up in a mixed-faith family and it isn’t the easiest job to get them as enthused about Eid as it is for Christmas. A festival to mark the end of a month of not eating or drinking is possibly not quite as child-friendly as a day to mark the birth of a baby born in a stable. My method for getting the kids excited about Eid is to use the only language they understand — bribery. I remind them that Muslims celebrate Eid twice a year — meaning my kids get three times as many presents as their friends growing up in non-Muslim families. Eid Mubarak!