When our son turned 6, my husband and I bought him a puppet theater and a chest of dress-up clothes because he liked to put on plays.
We filled the chest with 20 items from Goodwill, mostly grown-man attire: ties, button-down shirts, a gray pageboy cap and a suit vest.
But we didn’t want his or his castmates’ creative output to be curtailed by a lack of costume choices, so we also included high heels, a pink straw hat, a dazzling fairy skirt and a sparkly green halter dress.
He was thrilled with these presents. He put on the sparkly green dress right away. In a sense, he never really took it off. For a while, he wore the dress only when we were at home, and only when we were alone.