Costumes: Cute and Creepy or Inappropriate and Violent?

Every year, the students of parade around the school, modeling their costumes to parents and anyone else who comes to see the little monsters.

Well, that's how it used to be, when I went there.

My son goes to the school now and today the kids still get to parade and they still get to dress up... sort of. No masks, no makeup, no weapons, nothing scary or violent is allowed. So, monsters aren't so much a part of it anymore.

The rules have changed since I was in elementary school. I went to both and Kenwood as a child and I remember standing in line next to a green-faced witch, someone with a plastic knife stuck in his back and various other ghouls and ghosts. I even remember dressing up as Freddy Krueger (the bad guy from A Nightmare on Elm Street) one year.

But I also remember a pair of kindergarteners crying their eyes out from fear of the creepily costumed kids all around them. That seems to me to be when the public schools began instituting more and more restrictions as to what kids could dress as.

My son has had to have duel costumes a few times in order to be what he wanted to be for Halloween night, but still be able to dress up at school.

For years, Halloween has been such an exciting day for me. I get to be someone, or something, completely different for a day. I have the opportunity to take on any persona— weird, wacky or scary. But with the schools bending away from Halloween traditions, could that one night of transformation be subject to revision in a more public way?

I can completely understand the schools sterilizing what we've come to expect of Halloween: terrified kindergarteners, third graders having plastic sword fights that go too far, fifth graders taking an hour to apply scary makeup and first graders losing pieces of their costume causing Mom and Dad to complain to the school about how their child's expensive costume was ruined. The restrictions are sensible in school, even though they do strip the holiday of much of its tradition.

But what about the costumed candy-hunters swarming the streets on Halloween night? Have costumes gotten out of hand so much that rules need to be considered for what's appropriate in public?

I myself have no problem with rubber gore and plastic demons and all that. The scarier the better. Halloween is a unique tradition among American holidays and I don't want to see that excitement fall apart because a few youngsters aren't prepared or mature enough to handle creepy make-up and goblins. Some kids may need to wait an extra year before they are ready to go door-to-door, even with parents, but there are plenty of other sterilized places for those young ones not ready for the plastic horrors of Halloween.

(Check out the at on Sunday or the at on Halloween night.)

However, the sexualization of Halloween has gotten out of hand, in my opinion. I remember reaching middle school when the girls and boys actually admitted to liking each other. Suddenly, violence and horror pretty much went out the window and the girls came in tiny, tight pleather cop outfits with mini-skirts, tiny white nurse uniforms and revealing versions of Disney's cartoon leading ladies.

Obviously, as a straight boy in middle school, this was a welcomed change-up. But as a dad and an adult, walking my son up and down Clawson's streets, I get weirded out and disappointed when I see a 10-year-old in something I would find sexy on an adult. It's shocking. It's creepy (and not in the cool Halloween way). It's inappropriate.

The biggest problem with this, for me, is the fact that those children are putting 'sexy' on a pedestal. It coud be because they have an older sister in high school that they look up to who is done up in something skimpy or maybe these kids find themselves sitting in front of episodes of Jersey Shore on a regular basis. Whatever the reason, children objectifying themselves before they can even understand what "objectifying one's self" means, is a noticeable problem.

At least this prepubescent objectification and sexualization is a problem to me, what do you think?