What The Hell America!

Scarcely a week goes by that Katie’s 9- and 6-year-old daughters don’t wear a costume to their school in the Dallas suburbs. For the “Neon Party,” they wore white T-shirts and the school turned on black lights at lunchtime. For “Adjective Day,” when the kids had to wear something, anything, that they could describe with adjectives, Katie’s youngest put on a Little Mermaid outfit: scaly, wet, shiny, glittery, beautiful. And Katie just purchased a koala getup for an upcoming lesson about—you guessed it—koalas.

No central database tracks dress-up days. But what I’ve gathered from talking with parents and looking at district websites is that they are proliferating, particularly for preschool- and elementary-age kids. Some schools have just a few a year; others do them as often as once a week. Katie, a 38-year-old health-care worker (who asked to be identified by her first name only so she could speak openly about her opinion of these events), told me that her kids’ school had a different dress-up theme every day in the two weeks leading up to Christmas. The holiday season can already be “a busy time of life,” she said. With the dress-up events, “it’s like, ‘Oh my God, now I also have to think about what you are wearing to school each of these days.’”

Not to be all “back in my day” about this, but back in my day, I hardly ever wore a costume to elementary school, except for Halloween. Spirit week was a high-school and maybe middle-school affair, so my parents didn’t have to do anything. I was old enough to dress myself up—or not. Plus, we had one spirit week a year. One. Before homecoming, we dressed up for Pajama Day, Wacky Wednesday, Class-Color Day, and a couple of others I can’t quite recall. Parents I spoke with agreed that the costume situation seems way more intense now than when they were kids.

As fun and cute as spirit days at elementary and preschools are, for parents, they are basically homework. And although some enjoy making the effort, others find it a burden—just one more thing to keep track of at a time when parental stress is so high that a former surgeon general issued a warning about it. On Reddit, parents complain about theme days that feel “never-ending,” “random,” and “completely unnecessary.” Audrey Hooks, a 44-year-old tree-farm manager and mother of three in Harlingen, Texas, told me spirit days are a trend that “all my mom-group friends talk about, comment on, feel overwhelmed by.” (Given the still-unequal division of child-care labor in heterosexual relationships, the responsibility of coordinating outfits is more likely to fall to moms.)

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If parents are lucky, something that works for the event may already be in their kid’s closet. Some days are as simple as “wear this color T-shirt”—pink for breast-cancer awareness, for example. Other days are more complicated, requiring parents to either get crafty or buy items that their child may wear only once: an ugly Christmas sweater for holiday spirit week, plastic accessories for Sunglasses Day or Mustache Day.

But the most stressful thing about spirit days, parents report, is that they often find out about them at the last minute. More than one person told me of their child dropping the bomb of “By the way, I have to dress up for school tomorrow” shortly before bedtime. Sometimes the schools themselves break the news annoyingly late. Katherine Goldstein, a 41-year-old journalist in Durham, North Carolina, who writes about community building, told me her kids’ school has sent an announcement on Sunday night for a spirit week beginning Monday morning—too little notice even for an overnight Amazon delivery. Many of the burned-out parents on Reddit have similar frustrations.

Of course, families can always blow it off. Goldstein has decided that spirit days are on what she calls her “don’t list.” “I think it’s completely absurd,” she said. “I have decided this is something I just cannot put any mental energy into.” The only exception is whether her kids choose to participate on their own. If they remember and make the effort to dress up with clothes they already have, she’s not going to stop them. But she’s not going to help or remind them, either.

Leaving it up to parents whether to participate puts them in the position of being the bad guy and risks their kid feeling left out or disappointed. Although Goldstein told me she hasn’t experienced much fallout from her policy, Hooks has had to manage some emotions. Her family has taken the middle path of participating sometimes, if it’s easy enough for them to put an outfit together. But you won’t find her weaving wires through her daughter’s hair for 30 minutes to construct a Cindy-Lou Who hairstyle for Dr. Seuss Day, even if other kids show up to school like that. She instead says something like this to her daughter: “I’m so happy for fill-in-the-blank’s name. She looks so cute today. That’s cool, but I’m just not going to feel the pressure as a mom to curate an outfit like that.” Hooks takes it as an opportunity to teach her daughter the lesson that different families do things differently, and she won’t always have the same experiences as her friends. “That is really, really hard, as a parent, to feel like you’re disappointing your kid,” she said. “But I had to just come to grips with that, and not get sucked into the arms race of whose kid dressed up cuter on Dr. Seuss Day.”

For Katie, as annoying as a dress-up day can be, “the default is always just to do it,” she said. Her daughters love it, and she doesn’t want them to feel left out. Plus, if she happens to miss an email about a spirit day and her kids are the only ones not dressed up, “I feel like a terrible parent,” she said.

Schools do not set out to make parents feel bad. No one schedules “Dress Like Your Favorite Book Character Day” with sinister intent. Schools want to build community and get kids engaged. “It seems on the surface to be such a lovely custom to even question,” Miriam Plotinsky, an instructional specialist in Montgomery County, Maryland, told me. “The spirit behind it is very much one of inclusivity and belonging.”

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At the same time, she pointed out, for events that are meant to bring people together, dress-up days can cause division. Kids may feel left out if their families can’t participate or choose not to. Even children who do participate dress up with varying levels of intensity, opening the door for jealousy. Spirit days can expose wealth disparities among families: Whose parents can afford to buy this sort of fast fashion for first-graders every time a new spirit week drops, and whose can’t? (Hooks said her PTA recently bought some props that the school can keep on hand and pass out on spirit days for this very reason.) Twin Day, a common theme, could be upsetting for kids who don’t have a friend willing to match outfits with them. And some of the holiday spirit weeks I’ve seen skew very Christmasy, alienating families that don’t celebrate Christmas.

Many teachers online seem to be tired of spirit days, whether because they also feel pressure to dress up or because these days can be distracting and chaotic. Adam Clemons, the principal of Piedmont High School in Alabama and a board member of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, put it to me diplomatically: “Any administrator would say that they definitely enjoy a normal day over a day that’s thematic.”

What if we just did less? The more spirit days you add to the calendar, the more reason to expect diminishing returns. Through a process psychologists call “habituation,” the novelty of a new experience wears off the more you encounter it. Unpleasant things become less bothersome, and fun activities get less fun. And how many spoonfuls of sugar do we really need to make the multiplication tables go down? “Just one Pajama Day” and that’s it is Goldstein’s suggestion. Or better yet, direct that dress-up-day energy elsewhere: At a school where Plotinsky once worked, each classroom decorated a hallway together for spirit week. Collaborative, in-school activities that everyone can participate in, she told me, work better to build community than kids just dressing up in costumes from home. Then again, that’s more work for schools and teachers than passing the buck to parents.

Unless schools choose to cool it, or parents rise up and demand that the yoke of spirit days be cast off, they will likely continue. Because the greatest weapon that spirit days have at their disposal is, essentially, How can you say no to this face? “It’s a total pain in the ass,” Katie told me, “but then it’s also super fun and cute and rewarding to see them so happy.” She said she’s trying to savor these days as much as she can while her kids are young. Still, she’s looking forward to summer vacation, when she’ll finally get a break.