#was able to get a hold of SCISSORS nevermind that I cut my hair badly

[razette]

Making poor decisions in a safe environment allows kids to learn how to develop critical thinking skills like pre-judging the consequences of an action and, failing that, how to cope with them without actually hurting themselves or others.

as someone who also hated bangs (i relate so so much, for me it was that 90s child bob with bangs, ugh) i dont blame anyone who wants to be rid of bangs one bit. i was lucky. after fighting to be allowed to grow out my hair, i too gave myself a horrible haircut. i got in a lot of trouble, but my mom agreed that i could grow my bangs out as long as i kept them out of my eyes. that was a personal pet peeve of hers.

so obviously i had bangs til i was 12 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

thats way more agency than some people got, even if it took until i was 12 to learn to manage my hair, i was extremely fortunate in that regard. I wouldnt be among the people who gave themselves bangs during the lockdowns.

More than that, tho, after finally being allowed longer hair in my teens i decided that also sucked. i cut it off when i was 20-- and i also hated that. which fucking sucked. so i dyed it green. grew my hair back out. dyed it purple. decided to shave it again just to be extra sure. maybe i was insecure the last time? nope, it really did suck. Eventually i settled into an undercut and dyed it blue. ive had it that way for ten years, and im done with hair nonsense.

i learned how to take care of myself and how much energy i cared to put into my hair (none.) i got to know myself better (I shaved my head right before getting a new lisence picture done. it haunted me for years.) i even found out how annoying it is to have green or blue hair in march (extremely), and how to be kind while suggesting people get their color vision tested.

In all that time i also had no issues finding or holding a job, nor did i experience any of the other kinds of fear mongering my mom tried on me. Hell, even my facial piercings only gave me trouble once, but much worse happened to others while I was there so like. it wasnt even one of my top 10 concerns at the time.

when i was finally happy with the way I looked, i decided that that happiness was more important than working for a company that thought they were entitled to make decisions about my body. By making that sort of unilateral decision for myself ive had to really consider what opportunities that will cost me and figure out what steps i need to make to safeguard that decision while still living in reality.

And that is just the way my life has been pretty profoundly affected by something as simple what hair cut i was allowed to have as a kid. other people make other mistakes and different decisions. some people get to make all their mistakes as adults in a crash course of consequences, and all that control their parents had wont mean a damn thing in the end.

kids will be mostly okay if they do something stupid.

Ok, so here’s a thing. I talk a lot about autonomy and freedom for children, and a lot of times that comes up in really radical ways, dropping out of school, running away from home, *big life choices*.

But that’s not the only place where we curtail kids’ freedoms. Like, say a little girl’s getting a haircut and she wants to get half her head shaved so she looks like Natalie Dormer in The Hunger Games, like, first the barber’s going to look to the parent for permission (which is already fucked up) and then the parent’s almost certainly going to say no and tell the barber to trim a few inches off or whatever it is they think their hair should look like and…

What I’m getting at is that so many of the things we think we need to protect our kids from are *fucking harmless*. Shaving their heads, going to the supermarket in a spiderman costume, eating ketchup for dinner, these things are not going to seriously harm anyone. In so far as they are mistakes, they are mistakes that kids should be able to just make and gracefully recover from.

And I think the mindset here – that children need to present *normally* because otherwise what will people think of them, and what will people think of their parents – is *precisely* the same mindset that leads to abusive shit like “quiet hands” and ABA. That it doesn’t matter what they want, what’s good for their well-being, what matters is that they *look and act* “normally”.

Like it seems like there’s something akin to a curb-cut effect here? Where this mindset hurts developmentally disabled children more, a lot more, but maybe the most efficient thing to do is just to tear it out by the root, to criticize it wherever we see it? 

Like it’d be nice if we could just say, if they’re not hurting anyone, kids should be allowed to look and act the way they want to, they should be able to cut their own hair or flap or crossdress or refuse eye-contact or have cereal for dinner or not want to be touched and it should be the parent’s *responsibility* to fiercely defend their child’s right to do those things and set those boundaries against anyone who wants to give them shit for it, not to victim-blame and say no you can’t do those things because people will give me shit about it if you do.