Children wearing tails?

[ShepherdMoons]

Dd's friend at drama club has recently started wearing a tail.She sometimes wears ears.It looks quite cute but I also find it a bit odd (they are 11).Dd hasn't asked to wear a tail (yet) but wondering if this might be her next question.I appreciate there's a bit of a trend for this at the moment and seems relatively harmless but I do find it odd.AIBU?

When I lived in London (a few months ago), I noticed this a lot. Secondary school kids would walk past my house wearing tails and cat ears. It's weird.

Not sure it's different from you claiming it's everywhere without having surveyed us all 🙄

That's disgusting! Did no one ask her if she was ok?

20 years? Do you mean someone like the man who was dressed as a cat on Big Brother celebrity edition?

Neither do the people assuming its this furry nonsense.

Do most kids at 11 or 12 like to dress up as animals; most of them will be heading to secondary school, I can't imagine anybody I know and have known that age who would think this is anything other than highly embarrassing- and I have teenagers and we live in a very liberal city, where if this was a regular thing mg DD would have told me! My DD is 13 and likes Brandy Melville and vinted which I think is far more age appropriate! When my DC were little thy loved dressing up but this was up to about 7 or 8 accept on Halloween.

Except not accept.

Haven't rtft yet but had to reply. My DD went through this phase and is just coming out of it at 11. Started around 9. She did quadrobics with her 3 pals, the tails and ears and masks only were used during play. They did on a few occasions go to the woods with a parent so they could be cats alone. Us parents were a bit wtf at first but the general consensus was to just roll with it. In fairness they never went too public but they would have walked around in tails near their houses, but not say in a shopping centre or village. They were too young anyhow. They insisted they were not furries but therians so yes there was definitely an online influence coming from somewhere. I think they believed they were cat spirits or something, I don't think they genuinely believed it but pretended to.

If a kid is doing it alone there is definitely an attention seeking element so personally I would ignore and just see it as child's play. I would feel very different if it was a 14 yr old.

I thought this was going to be about this....

Turns out it's about this www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2023/aug/21/japanese-man-dog-long-haired-collie-suit-toco-in-pictures

Getting away with what exactly, wearing the cutesy cat ears? They were an anime thing before they were a "furry" thing. These kids don't actually think they're animals, they're just playing. I mean, perhaps a tiny tiny minority do, but most of them don't.

The adults are the hysterical ones. They a kid playing and decide they should be grown up already, conclude the kid thinks they're actually a horse.

How do 9 year olds know what therians are? My 9 year old wouldn’t even know the word. I don’t think 9 year olds pretending to be cats is necessarily a bad thing, 9 year olds are still young. But knowing what therians are would concern me- where have they got that from? What have they been watching?

You have to be joking

@Loooooo i think it's something either an older sibling said or someone at school teased them about. I think that's the difference, the online element is where it gets weird. Otherwise it's just play. None of them have phones and they all had very limited access to you tube or other devices so I feel it was very naive and childish. I'm glad the phase passed though.

I actually find the rigid attitudes on this thread about what play is age appropriate sort of disturbing.

There's a whole range of paces that preteens develop at, both socially and mentally. There's people here gloating that their kids are so very grown up at 11, 12 and 13, as if that makes their kids superior to kids who aren't quite there yet. Becoming a teenager is hard. Some 13 year olds still want to play like 11 year olds, others think they're 17. It's all within normal ranges.

Dressing up like this allows a nice comfortable middle ground between fashion and play for the kids who aren't feeling "grown up" yet. I was a kid like this, although in my local culture I dealt with it by leaning into a sort of pseudo-hippy aesthetic, all bright colours, psychedelic patterns, would carry a tarot deck around (couldn't even read tarot). For good measure I mixed this in with what I thought of as Native American fashion: feathery necklaces, howling wolf t shirts, you get the idea. There's a very real sense in which they were pretend clothes, like a costume I could put on and sort of play a character in while I adjusted to being a teenager. I outgrew the faze and emerged as a normal person who could choose clothes that I liked and talk to other teenagers normally (well, in truth via the route of becoming a "scene kid", if anyone remembers those). I had a couple of friends like me who were very into anime and who leant into the cat ear/ Japanese kawaii aesthetic. The furry thing is just this generations iteration of that.

By the way, everyone sitting around wondering where kids get therians from - they get it from the wider culture. Media aimed at kids is overwhelmingly about talking animals. Lion King, Kung Fu panda, all the side kicks to all the princesses, all the storybook characters, Pokémon, all this stuff teaches kids - for years - that animals are just people who look a bit different, and that there's something it is like to feel like these animals. Then they hit a specific age and we want them to just stop watching it, or they're "weird" and "being groomed". Don't swamp your kids with talking animals if you have very specific ideas about when they should stop liking the media you've been feeding them for the last 11 years.

No, furries have been around since at least 2002 which is when I first heard of them.

I didn't claim that anywhere. I'm still not claiming it but your assessment of the situation based on your tiny knowledge of a few schools is redundant.

Hardly a whole generation!! These things are unbelievable precisely because they are rare. I mean my DD's secondary went crazy because there was a few faint pink stripes that hadn't quite washed out of her hair after the Summer holidays. There's clearly no way someone would be allowed to pretend they are a fox!

Might not be. Might just be because they went to a festival in the summer. Lots of kids wearing tails there. There is a regular stall that sells tails at the festival we go to. Just fun festi wear along with the vintage clothes and silly hats.

My 8yo (y4) dd is apparently a "Therian".......Arctic Fox being the theme........I was the same when I was her age (although I was a horse!)..... I'm putting it down to play.......I grew out of it.......

So the adult sexual fetish it derives from isn't a problem?

No, that is not what this is about.

I know the other explanation but how are you so sure?

I have a friend who spent her teens in psychiatric hospitals. She recalls one patient that thought he was a cat.
The wards would be rammed full nowadays.

Saying that, I used to wear cat ears in my 20s (small ones attached to a headband). I just liked them. Not a furry, and not into anime.