Dress is a powerful means of communication and makes
statements about the gender role of a newborn child soon after birth.
The dressing may seem like a simple task, but it is actually a task that requires multiple skill sets from children. Lots of tots are ready to start learning dressing skills around age two.
Some publications intended as guides for fieldwork offer classificatory
systems and terms for describing dress. Probably the best known of
these are the Royal Anthropological lnstitute’s Notes and Queries in
Anthropology (1951) and Murdock’s Outline of Cultural Materials
(1961). In each authors subdivided dress into the familiar
categories clothing and ornament. more recent book on methods
edited- by Ellen ic Research: A Guide to General
Conduct, offers no classification system, but refers the fieldworker
back to both Notes and Queries and Murdock’s Outline as general
stai:ting _p.oints__fru_genel:l!!ing initial checklists of terms to try out in
on-site study. Thus this volume also helps perpetuate the clothing and
adornment dichotomy. Other authors who have attacked the problem
of classification and terminology are Doob ( 1961 ), Roach and Eicher
(1973), Conn (1974), Roach and Musa (1980), and Anawalt (1981).
Conn continued the clothing and adornment categories. Doob declined
to use these categories and opted to use in their stead “changes in appearance,”
which he further subdivided into changes of the body and
changes on the body. Anawalt, emphasizing only the construction of
garments, divided them into five somewhat overlapping categories:
draped, slip-on, open-sewn, closed-sewn, and limb-encasing.
Key points in teaching the development of general dressing skills.
Independent dressing is a skill that takes us years to learn and refine. Before we can learn to undress, dress and manipulate clothes fastenings, we need to acquire foundation skills to provide a strong base of experience and learning.
• understanding and controlling our body’s
• understanding where our bodies are in
space and how to coordinate each bit in
• how to plan, remember and sequence a
series of instructions and movements
• how to utilise the intricate movements of
our hands and use a variety of grasps and
• how our bodies (and particularly our hands)
can effectively feel and discriminate one
touch or piece of clothing from another
• how we can process the information we
receive from our eyes and coordinate
this with our movements to successfully
manage the task.
Within dressing our aim should be independence and completing the task within an appropriate time frame using an appropriate amount of energy.
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