For very young children an adult seldom needs to suggest the playing of a dress up game. Small children of both sexes love to dress up. This fact did not really hit-home with this writer until she and her son visited two girls living in York County of Pennsylvania.

This writer had grown-up in a home where the only male presence was that of her father. She had had no brothers. She had played catch with her father, and she had joined a male neighbor as he watched and identified the cars on a local street. She thus knew that boys liked sports, and they liked cars. But she had never seen a small boy playing a dress up game.

This writer had played more than one dress up game when she was a small girl. She would find in the basement the old shoes discarded by her mother, or she would organize the production of a play in which everyone got to dress up in a special costume. Almost all of her playmates were other girls, so she did not appreciate the eagerness of young boys to dress up.

Now in 1982 this writer became a mother for the first time, the mother of a baby boy. By the time that that boy had reached the age of 16 months, this new mother saw for the first time the degree to which all children enjoy some form of the dress up game. It was at that time that she and her mother-in-law laughed together as her son walked down the driveway wearing his father's shoes.

That one incident, however, did not jolt this writer into the realization that boys as well as girls like to play the dress up game. That realization came about two months later, when this writer and her son spent two weeks at the home of the boy's maternal grandmother. This was a home 3,000 miles from the boy's home in Los Angeles. It was a home located in York, PA.

No doubt the distance of this writer's son from his home served to underline his fascination with the game suggested by a young girl, a girl who the writer and son visited during their stay in York. That young girl asked her young male guest whether or not he liked to play dress up. Although he had just met this young lady, and although he was miles and miles from his home, the small boy from L.A. responded positively. Quickly he said that yes, he liked to play the dress up game. 
So it was that those two children, joined by the younger sister of the girl who had suggested the dress up game, came to spend much of the afternoon playing dress up. They demonstrated the degree to which a game of dress up can overcome the absence of toys that are normally of interest to members of a particular sex. On that afternoon the dress up game proved to be a wonderful substitute for access to large numbers of toy cars.

Because one girl had suggested a dress up game, a little boy, a boy 18 months of age, found himself able to bypass the fact that the home he was visiting had only one small toy car. It had a great many dolls, but that little boy was not interested in dolls. That little boy had demonstrated the widespread appeal of dress up for kids.

His enthusiasm got his mother thinking. His enthusiasm helped his mother to design new places for encouraging dress up for kids. She added all sorts of clothing props to her efforts at supervised role playing, role playing that she later directed during Baha'i children's classes.