Bye bye twins day

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One of the special days the student council at my son's school picks is called twin's day. Where children can dress alike with a friend, etc. Many of the kids find it to be a blast - my daughter and her friend had a great time planning. But after my AS son couldn't sleep the night before, getting more and more upset about how things had gone for him trying to match up with a twin, I decided enough was enough, and said something at a parent meeting. It turns out it is stressful for most of the families, but the parents figure it's another teaching moment and deal with it, and enjoy the cute results. Still, I wasn't the only one upset at seeing their child upset and the message that this really hurts some kids came through. The principal of the school will no longer allow the student council to choose this particular event, because the cost to some of the children is too high.

Being heard is a good thing.

YAY!! !

Wow, I've never heard of that. We missed a dress up day last week because my son didn't get his homework (with accompanying newsletters) the whole week.

I dread dress up days.

We have one called crazy hair day. J wants to take part but as you all can imagine hates his hair being touched.

He wants to take part in all dress up activities but he doesn't want to stand out, he would love to dress in his fav character but feels he can't because he will be teased. So we console him by letting him wear what he thinks will blend in, but we pay the price by having a cranky, nervous kid. I tried telling him once that he couldn't do it, that was much worse.

Dress up days = stress, tears,tantrums and more stress.

This reminds me of something we had at school, called "mufty day". In the UK most school children wear uniforms, but once or twice a year, usually a couple of days before an end of term there would be a day when could wear "own clothes", ( "mufty" like non-uniform in the army).

It was supposed to be a treat, and maybe was for a few psychopathically confident or blissfully unconscious children, but for many of us it was agonising, alarming, and embarrassing. Adapting to the uniform was already a trauma, trying to make it look as non-creepy as possible, but to be exposed in own clothes............aaaaarrrghhh! I would suddenly be even more visibly "all wrong" than usual.

It was very stressful. Just imagining how much worse it would have been if had had to match someone else .....

My son actually does really well with crazy hair day. I let him totally do his own thing. And since crazy hair day is about no one doing anything normal, it works.

I can see the point about all the dress up days, and I've had more than my share of battles over all of them, but this came down to a "pick your battles" decision: the problem with twins day goes beyond issues with the others, because this one requires coordinating with other children and "choosing" who you will dress up with. And I had had enough.

As I said to the other parents and to our school principal, as grateful as I am that my special needs child has friends, good ones, I really don't need a school event to remind him that all his best friends, are actually better friends with someone else. And while this event was chosen by the children themselves, the simple majority vote process by it's nature gives no support to those who are less popular and dread the day. And it wasn't just my special needs child that had spent the night before in tears - another parent stopped by, not knowing we were already discussing it, and very poignantly described his daughter's upset about it all, and also asked that we never hold such an event again.

It is interesting how this whole thing had built up with my son over the years. For the most part, he copes really well, and accepts being the third wheel in most of his friendship groups. Other twin days, past years, he's been frustrated with, but seemed to accept. But, you know, as with many things, when you keep getting confronted with the same stress and the same issue and come to realize that no matter how hard you try it will never change, something eventually breaks. With my son, this most recent twins day was the straw that broke the camels back.

I really wish I'd challenged it sooner, a few years ago.

I'm not planning to try to rid the others, but after reading the posts here I am going to work on being much more sensitive to how they might be affecting my son, as well.

We never had a twins day but we had a mismatch day. On that day you were supposed to wear clothes that didn't match. And kids would do things like braid one side of their hair, and leave the other down, have one pant leg rolled up and the other not. Some kids were pretty creative with it