Mothers look forward to having daughters. They imagine dressing them up in different clothes and their daughters letting them.

Even the grandmothers get in the clothes action.

That’s what happened with Emily Whitlow’s five-year-old daughter.

Emily’s mother gave her a cute little sundress as a gift. And Emily decided her daughter could wear it to school that day. They were enjoying a rare warm day in Minnesota, after all.

And that’s when Emily did when she dressed up her daughter for school that day.

“Now, I knew the weather would be nice today. I sent her to school with a light sweater over her dress and jeans underneath… it. It’s a new dress that her grandma got her and she really wanted to wear it. We live in Minnesota and having 65-degree weather in April a week after a snowstorm is everything to us in the Midwest,” Emily wrote on her viral Facebook post. “So, I thought ‘yeah it will be nice out you can wear a dress.’

But Emily didn’t realize it would become an issue when she picked up her daughter at the end of the school day, who was now wearing different clothes.

“It didn’t occur to me that an adult would look at my 5-year-old child and think that wearing a dress was inappropriate,” Emily continued.

Emily asked her daughter what happened, especially since she climbed into the car clearly upset.

Her daughter told her that she needed to leave the class and go to the nurse’s office. When she got there, the nurse told her she needed to cover her body. That’s when the nurse gave her the shirt she wore when Emily picked her up.

When she wrote about it on Facebook, so many of her friends and other moms agreed with her outrage.

“I get certain dress codes for middle schools and/or high schools, but this is ridiculous! She’s five,” Rebekah replied.

“She’s 5, but it’s OK for boys to walk around with there pants hanging down and for girls to wear skin tight shorts or tops. Come on she is 5 and Mom is the one that should say what she can and cannot wear,” Mary chimed in.

“So the logic is “Excuse me little girl, you need to cover your shoulders because currently you are far too sexually attractive,” Rowan added.

The issue became relevant and Emily was compelled to write about her daughter’s experience.

“I am not making this post to bash the school or say anything bad. I’m making this post to raise some discussion,” Emily said. “As a mother, how am I supposed to teach my daughter to love and celebrate her body when she has people telling her she ‘needs privacy.’ What exactly is private about a 5-year-old’s shoulders? Why is it ok to put my daughter’s bare shoulders before her education? Why was her dress looked at as an inappropriate outfit, to begin with? She is 5 why is she being sexualized?”

These are the questions that Emily wanted to be answered. The whole incident made Emily’s daughter feel bad about herself and the issue needed to be addressed.

This little girl loved her dress. And she couldn’t wait to show it to her friends.

But she never got a chance to. Because the school told her it was an inappropriate dress that revealed her shoulders.

“She said to me, ‘I don’t know why they told me I couldn’t wear my dress it was super embarrassing,'” Emily shared. “How do I teach a little girl that what she wears and her appearance is not nearly as important as her education and self-development when things like this happen?”

“We simply asked the question, ‘Why is this rule in here?'” Emily said. “The principal did not have an answer for us. I do think that just because there are rules in place, it doesn’t mean it’s okay.”

And this applied to specific rules that the school could not explain its inclusion in the dress code.

Emily’s desire to spark a discussion about the school’s dress code has resulted in a win.

The school’s principal, Jason Healy, has said that they entered a discussion about the dress code policy, not just in their school but in other schools in the area.

The school district decided to update the school’s dress code. It no longer “includes the ability for adults to make determinations about the appropriateness of a child’s body.”

According to Emily, “Making noise works!”

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Source: Facebook/Emily Stewart, FOX9