I Cut My Hair and My Daughter Freaked Out
The author and her daughter, when both had long hair. (Photo: Beth Greenfield)
I have gone through endless phases with my hair over the years. I’ve always been attached to the fact that it’s red — “like a shiny copper penny,” as my mom likes to say — though my attachment to its length has waxed and waned: As a teen I permed and teased my hair, simply because it was the ’80s. It flowed down my back in college, part of my Deadhead aesthetic, and got shaved to its nub in my late 20s, when I was both traveling to India and yearned to be free of constraints, and when being newly out and proud felt more important to me than any hairstyle.
But I learned recently that someone else had become extremely attached to the length of my locks: my 6-year-old daughter.
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“Please don’t do it!” she begged recently when I told her that I’d been flirting with the idea of going short again. Aside from a brief bob, my hair had only ever been long, with blunt-cut bangs, since she was a baby. “I will never like it!”
Her reaction took me by surprise. “But why?” I asked.
“I don’t know!” she said, frustrated. And then she started to cry.
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I held her close, smoothing her own long, honey-colored hair, and told her I’d think about it. Then I reminded her of all the beautiful, strong, feminine women who have short cuts — our friends Molly and Jen and Candice and Tamara, and even her favorite pop star, Pink. She calmed down and listened, but I could tell she was not convinced. Finally, I dropped the subject, secretly deciding that I’d do it in the coming weeks but stop processing it with her beforehand.
The night I turned up at home, freshly shorn, she blinked back tears and forced a smile. “It’s okay if you feel sad about it,” I told her. That’s when she started crying again. It was like my new appearance was not only jarringly unfamiliar to her, but somehow challenging her own identity — not to mention her girly notions of beauty and femininity.
“I think this is a very common response from children to a parent changing their appearance, in that the change in appearance causes a small attachment rupture,” Dr. Laura Markham, a Brooklyn-based child psychologist and author, tells Yahoo Parenting. “I still remember when my husband, who had had a mustache and beard, shaved them. It was very disorienting to me for about a day. He felt, viscerally, like someone else. So for children, this is much more powerful. They depend on us. When we look different, it shakes their sense of security.”
Much of that is due to something psychologists call a “conservation” problem, or not understanding that something can change in appearance without fundamentally changing as well. “Kids in the range of about 3 to 7 are very susceptible to this,” Marianne LaFrance, professor of psychology at Yale University who has done research on hair and first impressions, tells Yahoo Parenting. “So [your daughter] probably had some serious concerns of, ‘Who are you?’” In her research, LaFrance has used digital imaging to change people’s hairstyles, to oft-extreme reaction from observers. “When we changed people’s hairstyles, we radically changed the impression that people had of them, and many thought they were looking at completely different individuals,” she says. “So it’s not just little kids.” Add to the mix that society still generally dictates to children that “long hair is a girl, short hair is a boy,” she says, and you can really start getting a sense of the impact.
The after-haircut shot. (Photo: Beth Greenfield)
And the more I’ve been asking around about this, the more common I’ve found it is. “So funny how so many kids get freaked out by haircuts on their parents. I guess it’s change or pushing them out of their comfort zone,” my longtime hairstylist says. A friend of mine had an upset 7-year-old daughter on her hands recently when she went from long hair to short hair for a reason beyond her control — chemotherapy treatments. But after receiving a clean bill of health, this mom decided to keep her cropped ’do, which apparently added insult to injury. “Why aren’t you growing it back?” her daughter asked, dumbfounded. “Because I like it short,” she told her long-haired girl, who’s been slow to accept this change. Another friend saw more of a fear reaction from her almost-2-year-old recently when her curly-haired mom showed up with pin-straight locks. “She was super standoffish,” she recalls. “It was like, ‘stranger danger!’”
Such change can create an impact that can last decades, apparently. One mom I spoke to can still recall being stunned as a little girl when her longhaired mom came home with a short new ‘do; another, now well into her 60s, still remembers crying at age 7, after her dark-haired mother became a redhead.
But there’s good news in all this, according to Markham, who says, “Kids recover quickly as they are reassured that we are indeed their safe parent.” This was certainly true with my daughter, who took about two days to start coming around to my haircut. “I do kind of like it,” she admitted, petting my head as if I were a cat. “And if I don’t think about missing your long hair, then I really like it a lot.” Then, she added, “Maybe I’ll even cut my hair someday.”
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