Photo by Annie Martin

When Tom Burns first watched “Star Wars” with his seven-year-old daughter earlier this month, he didn’t expect to be sporting a Princess Leia costume a few weeks later. But that’s exactly what happened after his daughter said she wanted to be Han Solo for Halloween.

“When she asked if she could dress up as Han Solo, it seemed as if she was asking permission, and I could tell that part of the hesitation was the gender thing,” Burns tells Yahoo Parenting. “I immediately said ‘Yes, of course that’s ok! The gender thing shouldn’t even enter your mind.’ So when she said, ‘If I’m Han Solo, you should probably be Princess Leia,’ I couldn’t argue that point.” The 37-year-old dad’s biggest hesitation? “I’m an almost-40 year old balding dude, how am I going to pull off the hair?”

But he did. In a post on The Good Men Project, where Burns is an editor, he explains he found a Princess Leia hoodie that came with the trademark buns online, and slipped on a Red Cross nurse’s skirt from a local store. “If she had asked me to wear the gold bikini, there might have been some pushback,” he says. “But anytime she says ‘Can I do this?’ or ‘Can we try this?’ I always want to say, within reason, ‘Yes, let’s try that. What could be the harm?’”

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Parenting expert and family physician Dr. Deborah Gilboa says Burns is creating an important family environment by being open to his daughter’s ideas. “What we’re saying to our kids when we say yes is ‘You matter, I hear you,’” she explains.

Burns notes that his daughter seemed to appreciate how quickly he agreed to dress as Leia, even though she knew the gender-swap costumes would be considered funny. “She has said things like ‘I don’t think I’m normal because I like Barbie and I like Batman,’ so we’ve had the ‘you like what you like’ discussions,” Burns says. “I want her to know: girls wearing boys clothes, boys wearing girls clothes, it’s just people in clothes and people doing what they want to do.”

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In his post on The Good Men project, Burns explains that he wants to teach his daughter that “equality goes both ways. If I’m going to tell my daughter that she can do almost anything a man can do (excepting some very specific biological acts), then I also need to show her that a man can do almost anything a woman can do, too.”

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Setting this kind of positive example for young kids, especially girls, is vital to a child’s development, Gilboa says. “We know that girls’ self-confidence peaks around age 9 or 10, and that in middle school self-confidence takes a dive for most girls. Research shows that the more girls feel limited by their gender, the more self-confidence takes a dive and is tied to how they look,” she says. “Here’s a man who showed his daughter that not only can you be what you want to be when you are a 7-year-old girl, but even when you are the 37-year-old guy you can do the fun, exciting, brave thing. Parents always want to know how they can prove to their kids that they can be whatever they set out to be, and this is a great way to do that.”

The lesson wasn’t lost on Burns’s daughter. “When she saw my costume, she was so excited. She was like, ‘We’re going to look great together!’” he says. “At the end of the night, she grabbed my hand and said ‘Thank you for dressing up.’ I think it meant something to her.”

So this Friday, Burns and his daughter will put their costumes back on for trick-or-treating, and their Yorkshire terrier, Oliver, will be there too — dressed as Chewbacca.

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“I realize that she is not that far away from being a teenager, and there is a time in the not-so-distant future when dressing up in a complimentary costume with dad is not something she’ll want to do,” Burns says. “She is saying ‘I want to spend time with you, let’s do something together,’ and I would be an idiot not to take advantage of that.”