Why is this nonsense being indulged these days? He’s a boy, he doesn’t go into the girls changing room. There was a time he would be told this fairly robustly, and there’d be no more to be said on the matter.
No hand wringing and wondering were you doing the right thing?
No wonder kids are so confused these days, when literally everything is available to them, if they could only choose...
You know, I've always been suspicious of the modern child-rearing trend to tell children they can be anything they want to be. Prioritising "want". Because it's simply not true. It's giving them the false idea that all their wishes can come true, that their desires are the leading motivation for their lives and that adults are there to cater for these desires.
I believe that children need to know there are limits to the fulfillment of their desires; they need to know how to deal with failure and to learn to develop confidence that does not come from any external circumstance, but from within, from an inner sense of worth.
Telling a child they can do anything, be anything, that what they want is the guiding principle in life, is a pathway to deep disappointment and unhappiness.
For me, raising my own kids, it was always "do your very best". It's simply not true that everyone can be anything they want to be. But I see it all over the place, as some kind of maxim for success.
We all have boundaries as to what we can achieve or be. Every one of us. The quote above is so very basic, yet it's a conventional wisdom that has gone out of date.