It’s a chilly autumn morning in Bucktown. Pedestrians burrow into their jackets for warmth, and cars hum steadily throughout the morning as Ilana Schopin gets ready for school. Ilana laid out her outfit for school on her desk chair last night: a hoodie, hoop earrings and black Converse shoes. One addition makes this outfit more abnormal than usual school attire: pajama pants.
Ilana is not the only teenager who has taken to this resurging trend, as many teenagers have begun regularly wearing pajama pants to school — to the distaste of some U-High parents.
“I wear pajamas because they’re comfortable,” Ronen Malani, a ninth grader, said. “They’re just kinda easy to wear. You can just get up and put on pajama pants. There aren’t really that many drawbacks.”
Wearing pajamas to online classes was considered normal during distance learning. The dress code standard plummeted during distance learning, so when the stay-at-home order was lifted, students felt comfortable wearing pajamas to school.
“I put them on when I sleep past my alarm or had a bunch of work. Or if I stayed up late the night before. It’s usually like a last resort,” Ronen said.
Some students are concerned that wearing pajama pants to class might affect their learning. Maggie Colyer, a ninth grader, says she finds it harder to pay attention in class while wearing pajamas.
“The same way your performance decreases when you’re doing homework in bed, the same thing happens when you’re wearing pajamas at school,” Maggie said. “Because you’re so used to wearing pajamas to sleep, your brain associates the pajamas with sleep and you don’t pay that much attention.”
Some parents of U-High students have expressed distaste toward their children wearing pajamas to school. Kemal Badur, the father of ninth grader Azra Badur, is one of these parents.
“Wearing proper attire shows respect for an institution and its members,” Mr. Badur wrote in a text message. Similarly to Maggie, Mr. Badur noted the benefit of creating a psychological separation between your bedroom and your place of learning or work.
Unfortunately for parents like Mr. Badur, students like Ilana, Ronen and Maggie prove that the pajama-to-school trend will not be going away any time soon.
