Why won’t my kids dress like that?

In photo after adorable photo, Malia and Sasha are dressed exactly the way many mothers wished their children would dress: sweet-but-not-too-sweet, age-appropriate, classic.

With the high-stakes back-to-school shopping season upon us, non-first lady mothers took time from shopping - and bickering - to bemoan the gulf between what they’d like their kids to wear and what their children actually wear.

“I’d like her outfit to match,’’ said Linda Robbins, a Watertown mother shopping at Target with her 10-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn. Her tone was best summed up as: “Is that too much to ask?’’

“But give her a wrestling T-shirt’’ - literally, a shirt with a picture of a wrestler on it - “and she’s all set,’’ Linda continued.

Kaitlyn nodded cheerfully, and for good reason. Her mother sometimes weakens and lets the fifth-grader wear her beloved outfits - oversize shirts or wild tie-dyed tops paired with leggings.

“You’ve got to ask yourself if [any one shirt] is that big a deal,’’ her mother said.

With children becoming more opinionated about their clothing at ever younger ages, many mothers report asking themselves the very same question.

“Before you have children of your own, you see kids dressed like complete whackos, and you think, can’t the parents put them in something appropriate?’’ said Carrie Fletcher of Boston, the mother of three girls, ages 3, 6, and 7. “But when you have your own children you realize it’s not worth the fight. It’s all just pick-your-battles.’’

That pragmatic - and more peaceful - philosophy resulted in her oldest daughter attending a wedding dressed not in a pink sundress and cute sandals like her two sisters, but in a black leotard with silver fringe, black tights, a black pencil skirt and a black headband.

“I had to get away from the idea that it was all about me,’’ Fletcher said. “You have to remove your ego from the equation.’’

It’s a Zen attitude that took Fletcher a while to achieve.

“She was my first, and you have this idea of this charming package your family presents to the outside world.’’ Indeed, she says, her daughter is charming and bright and has good fashion sense. So what if her black winter coat with faux fur trim doesn’t look traditionally girlish?

These days, with even very young kids aware of labels and eager to have favorite characters on their clothing, caring slightly less about fashion statements may be a parent’s only defense.

“Kids today know brands in ways their parents couldn’t have imagined at that age,’’ said Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist and coauthor of “Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens, and Twenty-Somethings are Revolutionizing Retail.’’ “They know that what they wear says who they are.’’

While questions over the appropriateness of some girls clothing are all too frequent for parents, mothers of boys have troubles of their own.

“When we were kids, there were definite clothes boundaries,’’ recalls Karen Garb of Newton, the mother of two boys, ages 7 and 10. “You had your school clothes, your nice clothes, play clothes, party clothes.’’ Now, she says, “the lines are fuzzy. School clothes are the same as your play clothes.’’

Her current struggle: Her older son wants to wear his “awful’’ nylon sweatpants or basketball shorts to school.

“My strategy is typically hiding them, so he forgets they exist,’’ Garb says.

Meanwhile, back at Target, Robbins offered solace to mothers who found themselves comparing their kids with the Obama girls: “My question is, what do they wear when they’re running around in the White House?’’

We can only hope it’s mismatched.