Our Rules on Clothing

For some reason my one coworker and I got on the topic of raising modest kids and how to go about it. It got my thinking, how do Jason and I tackle the clothing rules in our family. We try our hardest to make sure every child is dressed modestly, but also comfortably because honestly that's my biggest concern. Right now with them being so young I feel like it's most important to teach them what you expect and what others expect, we obviously don't allow our children to wear anything inappropriate, but unlike the Duggars we don't make them wear things down to their knees at all times. The biggest issue we've run into recently is shorts, if you have a girl or have ever even seen a girl you know shorts are SHORT! Like I said before, I want my girls to be comfortable so obviously during the hot months they need shorts, but dang! We settled on the "finger tip" rule that most schools have-shorts much reach the persons finger tips to be deemed appropriate. So far it's working and I pray they never learn the "slight shrug" thing I did in high school to make my arms shorter. Besides our very lenient rules about modest clothing, we do have rules about how much clothes they can own. Because I'm crazy and want to become a minimalist-I know a lot of people think I'm kidding but I have donated more stuff than I have kept-we have made some rules about how much clothing they can keep, we aren't super strict about it because that's just insane, but we try to keep things extremely limited. Right now every kid has ten shirts, ten pairs of paints(five shorts, five long pants), the girls have five dresses each, and the boys have a handful of dress clothes. I know, it sounds crazy and we sound like terrible parents, but it has helped us get ready easier in the mornings. There are no longer hours of yelling "MOM I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO WEAR!" now it's just grab the shirt, grab the pants-GO! Also, shockingly there is less fighting between our girls on who gets to wear what! I was expecting them to fight more because of having less to choose from, but they are actually taking turns wearing certain items. I think it helped that they were involved in the process of picking what stays and what goes. I hope the toy purge goes as well as this did!