@saturnnights - Texas

@lupa - ”open and supportive”  Yeah, that was pretty much how I always was with Doug.  We had safety rules I insisted he obey:  three points of contact at all times while climbing, look before crossing the highway, always treat all guns as if they are loaded, make sure the target has a solid backstop so you don’t shoot someone a mile away, don’t pet the moose, etc.  I also tried to enforce basic hygiene like baths, clean underwear and hair combing.  He remains somewhat safety conscious in certain hazardous situations, but not so much in others.  Since he has been an adult I have not pushed or nagged about the cleanliness, and he lets it slide. Good thing for him his social life is online.

@soobee72 - I don’t see the sense in (restrictive) dress codes at all.  I guess a public school should have the right to insist that kids dress to the standards maintained by law in their regions, which usually means covering the genitals, and, in some places, the nipples.  I object to nipple-concealment laws for women in places where men are allowed to go bare-chested.  Men don’t breast feed, so women have more need, and therefore, more right, to bare their breasts.  Private schools, of course, can mandate uniforms, but doing so has been shown by research to have negative psychological effects on some students.  If young people were free to dress or go bare as they please, it would not take more than a couple of generations for a lot of our society’s current hangups and perversions to be extinct.

@soul_survivor - When Doug was in high school, his contemporaries were bristling with pierces.  He decided to be different, and I think it was at least partly because he’d already “been there, done that.” 

He had negotiated a trade, of a kitten for an ear-pierce, at a music festival where I was doing readings, when he was about eleven years old.  He wanted it because he had found an earring that he liked for sale in another booth, and had negotiated the swap of another kitten for it. 

My friend Rae, who owned a hairstyling and body piercing salon in Anchorage, and did it at festivals in summer for fun and further profit, asked my permission before letting her employee pierce the kid.  I said okay for one ear, but if he wanted glitter hanging from his nose, eyebrow, navel, tongue, foreskin, etc., he’d have to wait until he was an adult.

The young man who did the piercing had about seventeen ornamented holes in his face and ears.  Before doing Doug’s ear, he gave him a strict lecture on antisepsis, showed him pictures of infected pierces, and gave him an instruction sheet for piercing care.  The physical sensations of having the jewelry
hanging there on his ear were distracting and unpleasant to Doug, and
the hole soon grew closed.

@lupa - Yes, in the research I read, it works that way for some kids.  Others will go to great creative lengths to get some individuality into their uniforms.  If differences are allowed, for example, in barettes, hair ribbons, shoes or socks, they go for the flashiest they can get away with.  Or they hide their rebellion with sexy underwear or no underwear at all.  Some kids fall into line as if they were born on rails, while others squirm and fight or shrink and wither if they can’t be themselves.  Competitive impulses find other outlets or become repressed, to break out erratically outside of school.