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He warned her for a year, then took things into his own hands.
By John Sundholm — Written on Mar 17, 2023
Teaching kids about hygiene is no small task. No kid wants to be bothered with brushing their teeth, and some kids don’t even want to take a bath.
For one dad on Reddit, this dilemma became a problem that required drastic measures. As he revealed in a post to the “r/Parenting” subReddit, trying to get his seven-year-old daughter to brush her hair has been quite the battle. So, he had to take things into his own hands.
A dad gave his daughter a drastic haircut because she refuses to brush her hair.
“Every morning is a battle,” he writes, and recently he decided he’d had enough.
The dad warned his daughter for a year that if she didn’t brush her hair, she would have to get a haircut.
The deal he made was that she would need to start brushing her hair twice a day, or it was getting cut short. He also spoke to his daughter’s mom, who agreed “that I can get it cut if she doesn't take responsibility for her cleanliness.”
He has long hair himself that falls past his chest, and he’s even demonstrated to her how to brush it since she complains she doesn’t have the “dexterity” to reach behind her to brush the bottom of her belly-button-length hair. “I've shown her multiple times how I bring my hair over my chest to brush the bottom,” he writes.
Still, she refuses.
After yet another argument, he cut her hair to above shoulder length before she went to school, and she was 'devastated.'
"This morning after yet another argument, I did it," he writes. "I cut her hair to about an inch below her shoulders." He went on to say that his daughter "continued to cry for another hour as I drove her to my parents' place to watch her as I went to work."
His mom and sister were both angry with him for doing it, even going so far as to say he needs parenting classes because he’s traumatized his daughter.
He clarified that he doesn’t expect his daughter to have an adult’s level of care for her appearance. “She doesn't have to be self-sufficient, but she needs to at least try,” he writes, saying that he’s just trying to teach her how to care for herself.
But given his daughter’s and family’s reaction, he wonders if he took things too far.
Kids refusing to brush their hair is a very common parenting problem.
As the hair stylist in the TikTok below reveals, hairdressers are constantly confronted with young children who refuse to brush their hair—and parents who are every bit as, if not even more, frustrated with their children as the dad on Reddit has been.
Battles over brushing kids’ hair are so common in fact that there have even been children’s books written about the dilemma, as seen in the YouTube below.
But as several parents on Reddit pointed out, the dad’s approach might have been a touch too harsh—especially since he cut his daughter’s hair in a moment of frustration.
One parent wrote that they agree that cutting his daughter’s hair was the right and necessary next step, but “I do disagree, as others have said, with your cutting it in the heat of the moment... She's only seven.”
Another parent agreed and had some helpful parenting advice for situations like when a kid refuses to brush their hair.
“Don’t argue with your child, connect and come up with solutions together,” the parent wrote, going on to suggest an alternate way he could have handled things. “‘The problem is, your hair is tangled and not taken care of. What can we do so that it’s taken care of and I don’t have to brush it for you?’”
“She IS old enough to problem solve,” the parent went on to say, “and your job is to coach her in effective problem solving, not do it for her. That’s how we prepare our children to become adults.”
In the end, the dad agreed and was grateful for the advice. He updated his post to say that he’d spoken to his daughter about it and apologized. “I think what I can learn from this is to set clear boundaries and consequences and always follow through with a cool head,” he went on to say.
As for his daughter, he wrote that she had thankfully already “bounced back” from the initial shock by the end of the day, and had already adapted to her new haircut. All’s fair—or hair, as it were—in love and war, as they say.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.