The Backward Clothes Kid

It’s a big milestone in childhood when a kid is able to dress themselves. It’s also an activity that toddlers and young kids are often not great at. Sometimes they struggle with getting the right extremities into the right clothing holes. Sometimes they forget underwear isn’t optional and hats are. Many kids will put their clothing on inside out.

It’s a common struggle and one most parents can relate to. But there is a type of kid that takes this to the next level. He’s what I refer to as a backward clothes kid.

It may all have started from a misunderstanding about the direction the clothing tags should be facing. That’s usually one of the easiest ways kids learn where the back of their pants and shirts are. But our backward clothes kid virtually always has at least one article of clothing on backward or inside out. And he is completely unbothered by this.

At first, you fool yourself into thinking this is a self-correcting problem. You see the kid walking around with an inside out and backward polo shirt, and you’re thinking that out of pure comfort for himself surely this kid will want to turn his shirt around so the tag isn’t rubbing against his chin.

You’re not unreasonable for thinking this. But we’re not in the realm of reason here. We’re in the realm of the backwards clothes kid and he sees things differently. How differently?

You know those little pairs of boys’ briefs that usually have some sort of movie or TV characters on them (Spider Man, Lightning McQueen, Paw Patrol, etc)? Well, when put on backward they have a way of wedgy-ing themselves if you know what I mean. So again, as a question of pure comfort you’d think this would be something that would lead a kid to put them on facing the right way -- but no. There’s a particular kind of subtle stubbornness in a backward clothes kid.

He thinks seams look better on the outside and buttons are cooler on the inside. He thinks zippers on the backside are no more bothersome than tags on the frontside. If you tell him he has his shirt on backward he invariably answers that he knows. He likes it this way.

I don’t see many adults walking around with their clothes on backward so the odds are in favor of this running its course in childhood. But he’s definitely past the point where his brothers all had learned how to, and made peace with the idea of wearing their clothes right side out.

I won’t give away his identity by calling out his age, Of course, I don’t have to give away his identity if you see the boys: he’s the one with the tag protruding from the front of his shirt.