Patch Blog: Dadmissions on High Heels

You can tell a lot about society just by looking at people's shoes. And that goes for kids too. An examination of what's hot is as close as a sneaker tread away at any mall shoe store.

Spider Man, Hello Kitty, Transformers.. they're all huge... and they're all on sneakers.

But if society is a mirrored reflection of people strolling down life on the Project Runway, then we might have just walked the plank right off the edge. You see, Michael Kors and several other designers are now launching new lines of heels for girls.

I'm not talking the cute, black, patin leather shoes with a buckle that have been the staple of little girl wardrobes for generations. I'm talking about heels. High heels for little girls. High heels for little girls as young as six.

The London Daily Mail calls it the Suri Cruise effect: stylish kids in the public eye
making average moms and dads feel their kids need to compete in the fashion world to fit in.

Michael Kors is offering a set of three inch heels for girls. Target, Jessica Simpson, and Kenneth Cole apparently all have their own heels for little girls as well. And with all these heels, it's funny, because the only thing I really want is a steel-toed boot to kick 'em in the shins!

I used to have a mental dad checklist of clothing and fashion that I planned to teach the girls about one day. It was pretty simple and went something like this:

• Jewelry: No skulls, snakes or pentagrams. No hemp (it's a gateway jewelry). And no metal chains.
• Tattoos: They better be Rated G and they better be temporary. A tattoo of a boyfriend's name means he is dead to me.
• Piercings: No piercing anything involving a nose, belly button, or god forbid, nipple.
• Cosmetics: Don't go goth; they look like vampires.

Heels were never really on the list but now they'll need to be. Every little girl tries to step into mom's heels at one time or another. It's called dress-up. And it's make believe.

Or is it.

Because I guarantee that little girls will now be walking around in these heels in the near future. None of us have ever met Suri Cruise. I've never even heard her talk. So it's surprising that we as a society might be taking our fashion advice from her.

Truthfully, it has nothing to do with Suri at all and everything to do with designers who seem to have lost their footing when it comes to what is proper fashion for little girls.