My daughter has long hair, which she loves, 99% of the time. But that other 1% is probably her least favorite part of the day. When it’s time for detangling, she runs, bargains, pleads, procrastinates, flat out refuses, and does just about anything she can to escape the misery of having her hair de-knotted.

I can relate. As a long haired kid, I used to dodge the brush so aggressively my mom just gave up and let me walk around ratty. Being on the delivery end of this kind of pain is one of my least favorite things about being a parent, just like being on the receiving end of it was one of my least favorite memories of being a little girl: The confinement (“If you move away from me, you’ll just make it worse.”)  The yank on my scalp, always inevitable but somehow still shocking every time. And knowing that tug of discovery was only the beginning of the tedious teasing-apart process to come. A bad knot could take days. Is it any wonder girls rail against this with all their might?

Which is why I fell in love with “Don’t Brush My Hair in Knots”. That, and the fact that the RAGING three year old girl in this video could well be the antidote to every shy, ingratiating, flirting, pandering princess your daughter holds in high esteem.

Check her out. Continue reading »

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Summer’s here, and the warm weather brings the bugs out. In addition to the summer joys of mosquitoes, wasps and black flies, parents get to worry about lice hitchhiking home from summer camp on their kids’ hair.

The New York Times’ Well blog estimates that Americans spend $1 billion a year on lice treatments to get rid of this persistent, itchy bugs. That’s a lot of dough to deal with the critters.

There’s good news though: you don’t have to take your kids to a “lice salon” to get rid of the infestation. While you can drop $300 a head on a professional nitpicker to clear out your child’s hair, there are home remedies that work just fine for a small fraction of the cost.

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The saga of Taylor Pugh – a.k.a. Tator Tot — and his long locks isn’t over yet.  The Mesquite School district offered Taylor’s parents what they thought was a decent compromise:  Tightly braid Taylor’s hair so that it doesn’t touch his collar or cover his ears, and he can come back to school.

His parents said no.  “If I braid his hair, his scalp will bleed and his hair will break,” said his mother, Elizabeth Taylor, who has offered to put Taylor’s hair up in a ponytail while he’s at school.

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I’m not saying a thing about Texas, because I’m sure it’s a perfectly lovely state.  But as soon as I read about kindergartner Taylor Pugh being kicked out of his kindergarten classroom for his moderatlely long hair style, I said to myself, “Must be Texas.”

And I wasn’t wrong.  I’m just sayin’.

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A little girl was playing with her braids during class, so her teacher decided to chop the thing off as a punishment.

Think that’s bad? She got the girl to come up to her desk by telling first grader Lamya Clemmon she had some candy for her. Continue reading »

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It’s been nearly 30 years since I’ve been clean shaven.  At first it was so that I wouldn’t be mistaken for a girl — not that that’s bad; it just gets confusing in the boy’s locker room — but for the most part it’s because I’m far too lazy to shave every day.  And now, I’m not just lazy, I’m a trendsetter.  Rather than shaving, it seems teenage boys are choosing to celebrate their new-found facial hair, even to the point of forming “beard clubs” at their school.
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I cannot possibly begin to imagine what it must be like to be a teenager whose father is dying from cancer.  I don’t know how a teenager could possibly deal with that — most teens have enough trouble just dealing with puberty and school and learning to drive and so on.  Fifteen-year-old Emily Pridham decided to shave her head to raise money for cancer research and to show support for other cancer patients.  “Basically my way of coping is to try and help other people going through the same thing,” she said.  So what could possibly be wrong with that?
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