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" As I was preparing to test Halloween costumes for flammability, I pored over pages and pages of offerings for the 2010 season. I noticed a disturbing development: While there&amp;#039;s still plenty of pretty princess an fairy outfits, there&amp;#039;s also a proliferation of &amp;quot;sexy&amp;quot; costumes for girls still wearing sizes as small as a 10. Now I understand that fifth-grade preteens want to look cool, eye-catching, maybe even scary, but it alarms me that looking sexy is now one of the options. Next week, a special event called the SPARK Summit in NYC will bring together a coalition of women&amp;#039;s and girl&amp;#039;s groups. The focus of this conference will be to empower girls with the ability to fight back against sexually-charged stereotypes. One of the events will be a Halloween fashion show featuring creative and spooky costumes, but not provocative ones. As your daughter looks forward to Halloween, make sure you participate in preparing her outfit and put the brakes on anything that&amp;#039;s inappropriate for her age. Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D, Co-founder, Hardy Girls Healthy Women (one of the participating groups in the summit) has the following advice for parents when they are helping their daughter choose a costume:  If she just has to be pink &amp;amp;amp; glittery, how about mixing it up: A feisty fairy? A princess with a sword to defend her crown and a map to find her way to the castle. A sparkly firefighter or even a rhinestone skeleton!  Go for traditional: Be a witch, a monster, or ghost. Avoid all those sexy diva witch costumes in the catalogs; instead, encourage her to look as scary, ugly, and awful as she can. It&amp;#039;s Halloween!  Choose a favorite book character: She can be Madeline, Anne of Green Gables, Dorothy of OZ or Hermione Granger. Or the scarecrow, Wicked Witch of the West, or even the wizard Dumbledore.  Don&amp;#039;t emphasis gender: There is no reason she can&amp;#039;t be a character usually reserved for boys! Halloween is all about being what you aren&amp;#039;t...let her stretch her imagination to become a vampire, ghoul, or cowpoke. Astronaut is not a boy costume! Just because someone labeled costumes &amp;quot;for boys&amp;quot; does not mean they are off limits to her. There are plenty off female police officers and fire fighters in real life!  Is she an athlete? This is her chance to become her idol off the court, field or racetrack.  A great woman in history: How about Amelia Earhart or Joan of Arc? Talk with your daughter about real women pirates, explorers and spies. She can be Jane Goodall (with a stuffed chimpanzee) or Sally Ride! But don&amp;#039;ts top there. Why can&amp;#039;t she be Van Gogh with a palette, paint brushes and a bandage on her ear? Or Mozart with a ruffled shirt, a powdered wig, a feather pen and composition pad?  Before you shop for costumes for younger girls, be sure to read our story to find out which ones flunked our flammability test. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/a21541/halloween-costumes-for-girls/?src=shelter_footer>