Educating children about hygiene isn’t any small process. No child desires to be bothered with brushing their enamel, and a few children don’t even need to take a shower.
For one dad on Reddit, this dilemma grew to become an issue that required drastic measures. As he revealed in a submit to the “r/Parenting” subReddit, attempting to get his seven-year-old daughter to brush her hair has been fairly the battle. So, he needed to take issues into his personal fingers.
A dad gave his daughter a drastic haircut as a result of she refuses to brush her hair.
“Each morning is a battle,” he writes, and not too long ago he determined he’d had sufficient.
The dad warned his daughter for a yr that if she didn’t brush her hair, she must get a haircut.
The deal he made was that she would want to begin brushing her hair twice a day, or it was getting reduce brief. He additionally spoke to his daughter’s mother, who agreed “that I can get it reduce if she would not take duty for her cleanliness.”
He has lengthy hair himself that falls previous his chest, and he’s even demonstrated to her how one can brush it since she complains she doesn’t have the “dexterity” to succeed in behind her to brush the underside of her belly-button-length hair. “I’ve proven her a number of instances how I carry my hair over my chest to brush the underside,” he writes.
Nonetheless, she refuses.
After one more argument, he reduce her hair to above shoulder size earlier than she went to highschool, and she or he was ‘devastated.’
“This morning after one more argument, I did it,” he writes. “I reduce her hair to about an inch beneath her shoulders.” He went on to say that his daughter “continued to cry for an additional hour as I drove her to my dad and mom’ place to look at her as I went to work.”
His mother and sister have been each indignant with him for doing it, even going as far as to say he wants parenting courses as a result of he’s traumatized his daughter.
He clarified that he doesn’t count on his daughter to have an grownup’s stage of take care of her look. “She would not should be self-sufficient, however she must at the least attempt,” he writes, saying that he’s simply attempting to show her how one can take care of herself.
However given his daughter’s and household’s response, he wonders if he took issues too far.
Children refusing to brush their hair is a quite common parenting downside.
Because the hair stylist within the TikTok beneath reveals, hairdressers are consistently confronted with younger kids who refuse to brush their hair—and fogeys who’re each bit as, if not much more, pissed off with their kids because the dad on Reddit has been.
Battles over brushing children’ hair are so widespread in truth that there have even been kids’s books written concerning the dilemma, as seen within the YouTube beneath.
However as a number of dad and mom on Reddit identified, the dad’s method may need been a contact too harsh—particularly since he reduce his daughter’s hair in a second of frustration.
One guardian wrote that they agree that slicing his daughter’s hair was the precise and needed subsequent step, however “I do disagree, as others have mentioned, along with your slicing it within the warmth of the second… She’s solely seven.”
One other guardian agreed and had some useful parenting recommendation for conditions like when a child refuses to brush their hair.
“Don’t argue along with your little one, join and provide you with options collectively,” the guardian wrote, happening to counsel an alternate approach he might have dealt with issues. “‘The issue is, your hair is tangled and never taken care of. What can we achieve this that it’s taken care of and I don’t should brush it for you?’”
“She IS sufficiently old to downside remedy,” the guardian went on to say, “and your job is to teach her in efficient downside fixing, not do it for her. That’s how we put together our kids to change into adults.”
In the long run, the dad agreed and was grateful for the recommendation. He up to date his submit to say that he’d spoken to his daughter about it and apologized. “I believe what I can study from that is to set clear boundaries and penalties and at all times comply with via with a cool head,” he went on to say.
As for his daughter, he wrote that she had fortunately already “bounced again” from the preliminary shock by the top of the day, and had already tailored to her new haircut. All’s honest—or hair, because it have been—in love and battle, as they are saying.
John Sundholm is a information and leisure author who covers popular culture, social justice and human curiosity subjects.