When Did Training Bras Become All The Rave for Pre-Tweens and Younger Tweens?

The tweens - that finicky age where the child’s maturity level is nearing that of the teenager with all the insanity and none of the hormones, and yet is still miles apart at the same time.  At least they like to think their maturity level is approaching that of a teenager.

They are trying so hard to act like grownups while they are anything but, and that shows no better than when it’s either bath time or you ask them to clean their rooms.

When Did Training Bras Become All The Rave for Pre-Tweens and Younger Tweens?

When I was in the 8 – 12 year old range, I don’t remember the training bra being a big fashion need.  Nobody made a point to saying, “Hey! I have a training bra!”  In fact, I don’t know of anyone who actually got one before they started developing something to put in it.

I wasn’t begging my mother to let me have a training bra, I was fighting for the right to wear blue jeans – something my mother considered dirty farmer clothing good only for the farm fields and not suitable for a girl in the city.

Flash forward to now and it’s started for us in grade three.  Grade three!  With the wee little flat chested children still years from growing anything and the most important fashion accessory has become <dun dun dunnnnnn> The Training Bra!!  

Apparently everybody who’s anybody has one!  And with a nine year old going into grade four, it is the absolute end of everything social life related for her because she doesn’t have one.

This isn’t the 8 to 12 years olds with the emphasis on close to 12.  No, these kids are the pre-tweens to early tweens.  Kids 6 to 9 years old who think this is a fashion must have.

The nine year old regales me with stories of who has and who’s growing, and as I see these very same children around town I wonder what world she’s living in because they are all as flat as a pack of two year olds.  In fact, the one girl who does sort of have something isn’t growing boobs, the kid’s just fat.  I’ve seen boys weighing in the same with bigger boobs.  Hell, I’ve seen toddlers with bigger fat rolls on their chests.

Even the younger daughter now thinks she has to have bras because she has friends younger than her who have them.

With children determined to be older than their age and maturity, do you go ahead?  Do you buy the training tool for something that isn’t even there to train?  Do you buy the leash and dog biscuits to train a puppy you don’t even have?

Or do you cling to that last vestige of their childhood, reluctant to let them grow up before they (and you) are ready?

The nine year old is already pushing for The Talk!  While I have been willing enough to divulge some of what she should expect with the coming puberty, there are some things a nine year old just isn’t ready to hear yet.  She questions and demands, asking if I’ve left things out and she is certain that I have left out some big mystical secret of womanhood.  There are a lot of those secrets I’ve left out, but I would have less appealing names for them.  Nothing mystical or wonderful there.  We will have that discussion before that part comes, but there’s no point in scaring the crap out of the kid before she’s mature enough to understand.

As a parent on a limited budget with two growing kids in need of so many things they actually do need, I think I’ll be committing the fashion faux pas of the decade and hold of on buying those as yet entirely unnecessary items - The Training Bra!!