Growing up, it was a thing for moms to relax their daughter’s hair. In fact, I had mine relax when I was about eleven. I felt happy because my hair flowed and can be easily combed.
Those were the innocent days until years later I started experiencing breakage and I couldn’t get my hair to grow past a certain length. But this blog is more on the power struggle on relaxing your daughter’s hair.
A Consequence To A Lack of Education
My mom was never educated enough to take care of my hair. In fact, the majority of her life she has been relaxing her own hair. After spending days tugging my hair with a comb and noting the pelo duro, it was time for my tresses to go.
My hair would have its good and bad phases of growing and…not growing. All throughout high school, I hated how damaged my hair had look and I was always jealous of the full, long hair other girls had.
High School= Hell
Nevertheless, it didn’t help when a girl decided to take a picture of me making fun of my hair. To make matters even worse, my family was extremely belligerent on me getting my hair relaxed.
As scared as I was, I would give in. I sincerely believed that my hair would look “nappy” and besides, what else can I do to my hair at this point. It’s either cut it off, which was a big no-no for me in high school, or continue relaxing.
The Relaxed Hair Trauma
Fast forward to college, and I’m fully natural. However, I reflect back on the trauma from people not knowing how to do my hair in the salon to my family giving me dirty looks for choosing not to relax. It hurt knowing that the hair that naturally grows out of my head was automatically “unkempt” and or ugly.
I say all this because relaxing your daughter’s hair can have an emotional toll on her. Honestly, I can say that going through those horrendous years of relaxing my hair has made me appreciate my own natural hair. However, If I had grown up in a household that was more supportive of natural hair, maybe things would have been different.
The natural hair journey is great, but it sucks that its called a journey because of situations like mine. And now, I have to suffer undoing the damage due to a decision I hadn’t made
It’s Their Hair & Looks, Not Yours
If anything, the daughter should have her own say on what she does with her hair. Let her get older and choose to do what she wants before putting a PERMANENT chemical onto her hair. Give them the choice to control their appearance because trust me, I had that choice.
A lot of people grow up with perms to then go natural later in life. Why? Because we see the hardships of being relaxed. For me, I was tired of sitting in a chair every first Saturday of the month.
I was tired of having my hair sit on top of my shoulders for years. I was tired of taming my crowns on my head. Most importantly, I was tired of not having a say on my hair, my looks.
So please, let your child get to an age where she or he can alternate their own hair. Having control of your own looks gives you a natural confidence. So let the child have their own say, not you.