Many parents have a tendency to be protective over their children’s hair. The golden locks, the chestnut curls... it’s hard not to feel attached. And one man is in serious trouble with his wife after taking their eight-year-old daughter to get a haircut without her permission.
Taking to Reddit’s Am I The Arsehole (AITA) forum, he wrote: ‘Me and my wife have a little girl...Anna has very thick blonde and curly hair that my wife adores. Ever since she was a toddler, she'd spend hours doing her hair every day, braiding it, straightening it and styling it in all sorts of ways.
'Our bathroom cabinets are always filled to the brim with a bunch of hair lotions, oils, creams and other fancy products I don't even know the names of,’ he continued. ‘So, I think it's more than fair to say that my wife's a bit obsessed with the whole hair thing.
‘Anna, however, has never been too fond of getting her hair done, or of anything that involves having to sit still for more than a few minutes,’ he explained. Before she got it cut, her hair used to reach past her waist. And while it looked lovely, she hated getting it brushed and every morning used to be a screaming fest between her and my wife.
‘Lately, she'd been begging for a shorter haircut,’ the man added. ‘My wife ignored her whenever the topic was brought up in hopes that she'd forget about it, but none of that ended up happening. I think Anna realised she was getting nowhere with her mom, because she started asking me to take her instead.'
You can see where this is going. Anna’s dad drove her to the hairdresser, and she was absolutely over the moon: ‘She got to flip through a lot of magazines and pick a picture of a haircut,’ the original poster [OP] explained. ‘And when she chose a really short clipper cut, I knew I was gonna be in deep shit with my wife. At that point though, there was no turning back. I mean, what could I have really done?
‘We went ahead with the haircut,’ he said. ‘By the end of it, Anna couldn't stop smiling. She went around the salon showing it off to everyone and even asked me to take a bunch of pictures even though she normally hates having pictures taken of her.’
Now, brace for dramatic impact: ‘When my wife got home from work that day... things quickly took a turn for the worse,’ the man said. ‘She refused to even look at Anna, locked herself in her room and cried then got in the car and drove off. It's been a day now and she's still not back, it's honestly starting to worry me. I knew she wouldn't react well to the haircut but I wasn't expecting her to take it this badly.
The OP added that his daughter now is upset too and thinks she’s in trouble for getting her haircut: ‘I realise how attached my wife was to Anna's hair, but at the end of the day I still think it's just hair,' he said. 'The kid's old enough to decide these things for herself and she was really happy with the haircut, so I don't think I did something wrong here.'
Truly, we have to agree. While getting protective over your infant's curls is one thing, not allowing your eight year old to get their haircut is another - she's grown up enough to decide how she wants her hair and was clearly elated with the clipper cut, so what’s the problem?
As one Reddit user put it: ‘Your wife needs to realise that her daughter’s preferences for her hair are more important than your wife’s preferences for your daughter’s hair. A daily screaming fest is not healthy for anyone’s relationship and to ignore your daughter’s repeated requests is cruel.’