^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com September 15, 2014}

Last month, my wife bought herself a new t-shirt. It was a Supergirl shirt, and it came with a cape attached via Velcro. Our son got extremely excited about the idea of Mommy being a superhero, and we thought it would be fun to get him a Superman shirt with a cape so the two could be superheroes together.

Weeks later, my son has worn his Superman shirt every single day.

At first we thought he loved the cape, so we got him a cape and mask (“goggles,” as he calls them) that he could wear with any shirt. But no – it’s the combination of his super-shirt, cape, and now his super-goggles that make the whole ensemble work for him. Admitting defeat, we bought him a second, identical shirt so he would have one to wear while we washed the other one.

I’m not bothered by this – I think it’s a cool little phase. Years from now, I imagine we’ll talk fondly of those few months when our son refused to wear anything but a Superman outfit. Traveling around with my own personal superhero has even taught me a few valuable lessons.

Almost everybody has an inner child. The sheer number of people who have shouted out, “Hey Superman!” or stopped and commented about how the kid in the cape is the cutest thing ever has reached staggering levels. Just about everybody remembers loving superheroes as a kid, and seeing my son wearing his cape seems to bring them right back to that time. The top comment I’ve heard so far came in a grocery store where one of the workers first commented on my Green Lantern shirt, then saw my son’s Superman shirt. Kneeling down, he said, “You know what? I’m Batman. My Batmobile is right outside.” My son then told him they could fight crime using their superpowers sometime.

Comic books are unnecessarily gender-exclusive. As far as iconic superheroes go, my son gets to be Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Green Lantern, the Flash…the list goes on. Heck, even Aquaman has been pretty awesome in TV shows and comics over the years. My daughter, on the other hand, gets to be Wonder Woman or a bunch of derivative characters. Despite a few solid efforts on the part of some creators, such as the current Captain Marvel, there’s an unnecessarily large lack of female characters who aren’t just some male superhero with the –girl suffix attached. Potentially great female characters, such as the Invisible Women or Storm, almost always get mixed in with part of a team rather than given a chance to shine on their own. And it’s not just that girls don’t read comics or watch superhero TV shows – it’s that the powers that be actively sabotage superhero shows that have a high female viewership, as was demonstrated with the cancellation of the Young Justice series not long ago.

I still plan on sharing my love of superheroes with my daughter, but there is a higher than necessary chance that she just won’t identify with the genre because it deliberately excludes girls. That’s a shame, but fortunately there are plenty of other ways I can bond with her.

Kids can totally separate fantasy from reality. I think it might have been a matter of where I grew up, but a handful of teachers in my elementary school got really worried about games of pretend going too far. One of my teachers even wound up calling my parents in concern because my brother spent all recess every recess pretending to be a Transformer. Seeing my son pretend to be Superman, though, makes it very clear that he knows the difference between TV shows and reality. Specifically, he calls himself “the real Superman,” as opposed to the TV show or comic book Superman. The real Superman pretends to fight crime, while the fake Superman shoots lasers from his eyes and lifts tanks. At three years old, my son knows perfectly well that what he sees on TV isn’t always possible in real life.

At some point, I expect that my son will take his cape and mask off and go back to being an ordinary boy. Until then, this super-phase of his is interesting, if nothing else.