With million-dollar baby Shiloh Jolie-Pitt making headlines for her tomboy chic, we ask the experts whether her choice of dress-ups is a normal passing phase or cause for concern.
Months before she was even born, photographs of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt were making headlines. US gossip magazine The National Enquirer claimed a grainy image on its front page was an ultrasound image of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s five-month-old foetus, while New York magazine mocked up a shot of the Hollywood couple with a computer-generated baby to illustrate a story on how much the print rights to such pictures might raise. As it happened, when the world’s most photogenically evolved child finally arrived in May 2006, her first pictures fetched a reported $8.1million.
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Fast forward four years and photos of Shiloh are again making headlines – for a different reason. The youngster’s long blonde locks have been cropped boy-short and she is rarely pictured in anything other than boys’ clothes. One day she may be dressed in a tie and pork pie hat, the next in a pirate’s costume, the next as Robin Hood.
“Does Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s daughter secretly want to be a boy?” shrieked one US commentator, while another theorised that the politically conscious couple was using their daughter to make a point on gender. “That could lead to self-esteem issues and role and gender confusion later on,” she warned.
Yet is Shiloh’s sartorial style – already dubbed “tomboy chic” by the tabloids – really cause for concern?
According to child psychologists, it is common for young children to experiment with cross-gender behaviour as a way of understanding their own gender identity. Little girls may like to play with guns, while young boys may pretend to be pregnant or enjoy dressing up in their mother’s clothes.
“That doesn’t mean they will grow up to become cross-dressers,” says Professor Louise Newman, of Monash University’s Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology. “As a child, you should be able to play around. It’s usually perfectly normal.”
There are rare instances, however, when parents may need to seek advice on whether their children’s behaviour falls outside the boundaries of normal play-acting. “Problems can arise if the child expresses distress or is not happy with their body or the things that they are expected to do as a boy or a girl,” Professor Newman says. “Or if the child runs into difficulty socially because he or she is not accepted by peers, or if the family is struggling to deal with what the child is expressing.”
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Some parents believe that young children should be able to express themselves freely – an approach that seems to have been adopted by Brad and Angelina. He laughingly told an interviewer recently that Shiloh would only answer to the name of John because of her love for Wendy’s older brother John in the story of Peter Pan. “We’ve got to call her John,” he said, noting that when he tried to call Shiloh by her real name, she would interrupt him with, “John, I’m John”. “So I’ll say, ‘John would you like some orange juice?’ and she goes, ‘No!’ ”
“There are some adults for whom this is very confronting,” says psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg. “Men, particularly, think, ‘God, I have a gay son’. Most mums are relatively chilled about it.”
Your say: What do you think about this? Do you think there is anything wrong with a child dressing up as the opposite sex? Share with us below.
Read more of this story in the May issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Out now with Susan Boyle on the cover.
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