Cold Enough to Freeze Your Knees

Every winter, the Today Show updates and reruns this article about boys who wear shorts all winter.

And every winter, I puzzle over it just a bit.

Nobody seemed to have similar quibbles, after all, when I was a girl and we wore knee-length skirts and dresses all winter long.

I quibbled, of course; I complained loudly and long about the injustice of boys being allowed to wear long pants in the winter, while I was required to wear dresses that left my knees exposed to the cold, for any but the very must casual occasions. More than that, by the time I came around, even most girls were dressing in pants for everyday wear. But my mother was in many ways old-fashioned, and did things the way they had been done during her childhood, and I was a girl and I wore dresses. In the winter. In Indiana. For pretty much everything except going out to play in the snow.

My mother simply said, “Your knees won’t freeze.”

And she was right; my knees did not freeze.

If it got cold enough to actually be dangerous, I wore knit tights or sweat pants under my skirts. But even that was rare. I didn’t like tights, after all, and sweat pants were unattractive.

Now, of course, I am a mother myself. I don’t have boys, I have two girls. But one of my girls is a wheelchair user whose mobility issues affect her clothing choices. She lives, year round, in basketball shorts and t-shirts, and complains as loudly as I did when she is compelled to wear dresses or pants.

Because it is easier for her to function independently in shorts, I permit her to wear what she chooses in most situations. I’ve taken some flak for this, on cold days, from people who think she should be more covered up. But it’s not as cold in Alabama as it was in Indiana, and I survived spending much of the winter with exposed knees, and unlike me, my daughter chooses to dress the way she does for reasons that make sense in her life. So I am not worried about it.

And to those moms who are fretting over their boys who want to wear shorts to school even in the coldest weather, my advice is, “Chill.”

If it wasn’t cold enough in Indiana to freeze my skinny knees, your boys are going to be fine.