The Hairbrush Battle

My daughter hates to have her hair brushed.   It’s like a battle where she wants to run away but knows she’ll get in more trouble if she does.   He hair is sort of like one of those rats nest-type consistency.   It was long without bangs and that required management so it would stay out of her face.   Sometimes—rarely—she’d sit still long enough for me to french braid it but mostly we’d put elastic bands in it and hope the majority would stay out of her food and the painting work she loved to do at school.

Then I gave up on long hair.  I had wanted her to have long hair since she was born with almost pure white hair but it was slow-growing, fine and breakable and it seemed a losing cause for most of her first five years.   We had gotten bangs cut once before but it was at the beginning of her vision loss when she was put on multiple types of systemic steroids and she ballooned up in weight, looking nothing like out thin little girl.   Maybe it was because of that that I shied away from bangs, even though it would clearly keep the hair out of her face.

But I got fed up with the hair brushing battle and we cut her hair short with bangs.   And she looked cute and we found out her hair was a lot thicker than we’d realized when we cut the weight off.   Now her hair is long enough to put in a pony tail or a “bunny bun” as she calls it, but it also stays out of her food and face and goes easily behind her ears when she wants to push it back.

But that hair brushing battle still remained.   You’d think I was a horrible parent, making her suffer through the simple act of getting her hair in a marginally less-messy state before school each day.   And then I had an idea: I’d let her brush her own hair.   The simple suggestion of her brushing her own hair (she loves being capable) has changed everything.    What’s interesting is how she brushes her hair; she isn’t gentle, she isn’t slow with the tangles, she aggressively brushes through all her hair in the morning quickly so she can get to the next thing on her little girl list of things to do.  

Sometimes the solution to a problem is just to go about the situation in a different way with children.

The Big Boy Update:  My children went to the boardwalk again today, this time with my in-laws.   There was a special for the day for a wrist band giving unlimited rides and this suited my son just fine.   I think his favorite one was what was called the Gravitron when I was growing up but was relabeled to look like an alien spaceship.   My son loved going into it and experiencing, “zero gravity” as he floated up to the top of the ride.   He was tall enough to go into the dark machine all by himself.   He wasn’t scared at all and he didn’t get nauseated from the spinning motion.   He loved it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter loves the rides at the boardwalk too.   She was telling people about it when they got home and I heard her say, “I was very angry, it didn’t go as fast as I liked.”  When we asked her what ride it was (I still don’t know the actual name) she told us it was, “the whipping car”.