It’s a rite of passage for many young kids: They find a pair of safety scissors in the art supplies, and the next thing you know, they’re giving themselves a haircut. The result is typically loose strands of hair everywhere, choppy bangs right before family photos (Why is it always right before a photoshoot?) and a lot of stress for grown-ups. But, one mom on TikTok is going viral for her unique approach to this dreaded event. Instead of losing her cool when her kindergartner performed a messy solo haircut, she decided to just…relax.
“Whoever needs to hear this, hair grows back,” says the mom, who goes by ValerieVixann, or just Valerie, on TikTok. In her video, her daughter is sitting on the floor next to a trash can cutting her hair off in chunks.
Valerie asks if her daughter wants a mirror, and then calmly talks to her daughter about how she came to the decision to cut her own hair. At the end, she encourages her daughter to check out her progress before cutting any more hair off. Her daughter excitedly shows off her handy work.
“Cool,” Valerie says in response.
Valerie’s video doesn’t show the kind of reaction many people expect when kids step out of line. There’s no panic, yelling or time-out. There’s no apparent shock. And it’s Valerie’s cool and calm reaction that has made the video such a hit. In just a few weeks, the video has gotten 1.5 million likes and been shared more than 28,000 times. In the comments, people are praising Valerie for her patience and for being supportive of her child.
“I’m obsessed with how you talk to her,” one person writes. “Thank you for being so kind and gentle.”
“Whether she likes it [her hair] or not, in 10 years she’s only going to remember that her mom supported her and encouraged her creativity and individuality,” another person adds.
Should kids actually be allowed to cut their own hair?
Given Valerie’s calm demeanor and the number of people applauding her, some parents were left wondering: Is haircutting just a thing we’re supposed to let kids get away with now? A few people commented to let Valerie know she has every right to say “no” to her child. One particularly disgruntled parent writes, “So, we’re just letting kids run the whole show now? Do whatever you want, it’s fine? OK, then.”
In follow-up posts, Valerie explains that she actually wasn’t feeling as calm on the inside as she sounded on the outside, but she made a choice to keep her cool. “Everybody was so kind and said I was calm and patient, but all I hear is the sheer panic in my voice thinking that this was right before the holidays and I had a whole slew of family photos lined up,” she explains. “I didn’t want to ruin any confidence that she had, but I was just thinking, ‘Please stop!'”
The mom was only able to stay cool because this isn’t her first time dealing with unplanned kid haircuts. In a separate video, she adds that her daughter already cut her own hair once before. It happened in the middle of the pandemic while Valerie was on a work call. “In my infinite parenting wisdom, I said, ‘Maybe let’s not do that again because you see this mess that it made.’ And then three months later, this happened. She loopholed me and brought the trash can out,” the mom explains.
A new approach to an old parenting problem
Valerie’s video exemplifies the way many Millennial and Gen X parents are trying to raise kids differently than the generations that came before them. Modern trends, like gentle parenting and Montessori parenting, encourage an approach that is less restrictive and more encouraging of autonomy and empathy for kids. While Valerie didn’t link her post to either of those parenting styles, her reaction to her daughter’s haircut shows a refreshing new way of dealing with a common parenting situation.
Valerie knows she could have stopped her daughter mid-haircut and taken the scissors away, but she explains that she decided to take a different approach because she wants to give her daughter space to be herself.
“I say ‘no’ a lot; however, if it comes down to something that’s not going to harm them and they’re doing a creative outlet, I try to let them express themselves as much they can,” she says. “They’re trying to figure out who they are, who they want to be and what they want to do, so if it’s not harming anybody, I’m just going to try to let it happen.”
