Frustrated Mom Shaves Son's Head: Cruel Or Appropriate?

In My Humble Opinion
61

What if I tell you that “something” will happen to you if you take the last slice of pizza. What is that something? You have to pay me fair value? I smack you in the nose? I take out a cleaver and cut your hand off?

Children learn how to relate to the world by making connections between cause and effect. Touch a hot stove and you’ll get burned. Run up to a strange dog and you might get bit. Go out without a coat and you’ll get a cold. The goal of punishment should be to use that reasoning process to reinforce the desired behavior; don’t do your homework…and you have to stay inside and study rather than play or watch television. But fail to turn in work and you lose your hair? There is no logical connection there; the punishment, however significant you think it may be, is completely arbitrary. That “compassionate punishment stuff” that “you don’t have time for” is called teaching your children how and why to do things, as opposed to expressing frustration and lashing out.

And I don’t see the Joan Crawford allusion as being out of line; as unhinged as she is presented, the behavior is analogous, if hopefully less dramatic, to that scene.

Yeah, there’s no seriously underlying problem–that’s why Mom grabbed the clippers and shorn her child’s head despite the four hours of crying. I’ll buy that like I’ll buy waterfront property over the Internet. Of course the kid lied; it was a vain effort to avoid this kind of punishment after failing (for whatever reason) to fulfill his required tasks. If D_Mark’s reiteration is correct, we know that she’s done essentially nothing–“She hopes this hair event will show him she means it when she tells him to do his homework and not get in any more trouble at school”–to figure out why he’s not turning in assignments. That the kid was told of consequences (albeit vaguely) and failed to make even a cursory effort suggests that he’s beyond merely lazy or unmotivated; that he lied indicates that he knew there would be a significant consequence. If this were a single instance–the kid wanted to run off and play with friends instead of finish up a math assignment–you could argue that there’s no alterior cause or motive. But the fact that it is a pattern of behavior demands some kind of cause or broken logic that needs to be addressed.

Er, what? The kid cried for four hours. Not ten minutes. Not a thirty minute “I wish I’d never been born” tantrum.

And if it wasn’t (or wasn’t intended to be) humilitating, what exactly was the purpose? Did he somehow learn better study skills? Is he now inspired to organize his time and keep a task list? Will he go into school tomorrow and apologize to his teachers for wasting their valuable time? Did he learn anything other than a vague sense of “when Mom gets mad, bad things happen”?

But since you (and others) seem to feel that there’s no offense to dignity, that shaving off one’s hair is no big deal, I challenge you to do out and do the same. Go ahead…get your hair cut off. Go on. Get thee down to the barber shop and ask for a buzz cut. Take it all off. Ask for a cue ball. Go.

What? You don’t want to? Your coworkers might look at your funny? Your head would be cold? You’d look strange without your hair? What’s stopping you? Not that dignity crap, is it?

Bull and shit. There is a massive distinction between discipline–establishing expectations and consequences, expecting and demonstrating respect–and bullying, which is about shoring up your own insecurities by lording over and abusing others. One can apply punishment–even, if you consider it necessary, corporal punishment–in a way that is respectful and reinforces the values you wish to instill. But executing a flaky penalty for a transgression–especially when you’ve done little to otherwise address an ongoing problem–just teaches kids to be similarly arbitrary when they want their own way about something. Is this the value you wish to teach your children?

Ordinarily I’d agree with your outrage on invoking this henious regime as an analogy to any everyday occurance; in this case, however, I think you miss the point, which is that shaving of hair is a more psychologically significant act than one might immediately ascertain, a method used by despots and fascists (Franco did the same to prostitutes and “loose” women) to control and break their charges. For an authority figure–one who holds, if not actually life and death, the control of food, clothing, safe keep and of course love over another–exercising this kind of punishment without due cause or reason is abusive, if not in ways that are readily manifested observationally.

But again, those of you who think this head-shaving is no big deal…please, be my guest. Cut it all off. After all, it’s no big deal; it’s just some fiberous keratin atop your skull. Go do it.

Let me know when you’ve done it.

Stranger

62

By some prisons, I was thinking of the Nazis and deliberately did not mention them by name because I new someone would latch onto it as saying the mother was a Nazi. Still, I think it has been well demonstrated that this has historically been regarded as more than a trivial act.

Did she warn of this specific punishment? The OP made it sound like she did not. That surprise arbitrariness makes it all the worse.

63

Stranger On A Train. Being vague about the precise nature of a consequence does not invalidate a reasoning ten year old child’s ability to make their own connections between one’s actions and the conseqeunces of one’s actions. We can argue effectiveness. We can argue reasonableness. We can argue authoritative versus authoritarian parenting styles. Just don’t argue that the child wasn’t warned or the child was completely incapable of knowing this could happen with his frustrated Mom. Kids know what their moms are capable of. He defied her at his own risk --possibly testing the waters to see what she would do and whether it was a bluff. The Joan Crawford analogy is wrong because she was abusive. This isn’t abuse.

The crying came after the shearing, not before so she didn’t do it “despite” the crying. We aren’t privy to the whole conversation or what she did or did not share, so we don’t know that she didn’t try and figure out why he wasn’t doing his homework. It could be, like many Moms, she knows exactly what the problem is: laziness, disinterest or boredom. If the kid was deliberately bucking her instructions to do his work, then she did exactly what she was supposed to do and follow through with her threat. Perhaps she can seek another solution if the problem recurs again. Also – where do you see a pattern of behavior? The only thing poking a kid with a fork and not doing homework have in common is they’re problems at school. The Mom is enforcing her end of discipline. It may be the teacher’s fault.

I disregarded it because I’ve never known a 10 year old kid to sustain crying for four hours straight. He might have been really upset for four hours, which is not the same thing. That said, even crying for four hours straight wouldn’t overly concern me unless this was a baby.

I surmise she intended it to be an embarrassing punishment for lying to her face for a week. Not a bad strategy. Hopefully the lesson learned was, “Don’t lie to Mom.” That’s not vague at all. Your remedy only makes sense if the kid does, in fact, actually lack homework skills. That’s not proven to be the case here.

A better challenge would be to cut off my own kid’s hair the next time they openly defy me for a week and lie about. Cutting off my own hair means nothing because it’s my decision. Incidentally, I shave my head bald every spring through the late fall. “Cue ball.” Heh, heh. That’s cute.

Oh, bullshit my opinion is bullshit. Look here: there is a massive distinction between occassionally aggressive parenting and being an insecure bullying asshole to your child. I’m thinking of some single mothers who-- in addition to being terrifc, supportive parents – will absolutely beat the shit out of their sons if they joined a gang. Their sons know that, too, and respect that. Now – frankly – that Mom is being a bully. But that kind of aggression is sometimes necessary to not lose your son to the streets. Similarly, if your child is lying to your face, that child needs to be put in his place – and I’m all for shaving his head to instill that lesson. Or her head, if it were a girl. There’s a world of difference between being arbitrary and using creative punishments and being inconsistent. The latter is much, much worse.

If you would ordinarily share my outrage with people who evoke Nazi germany in their arguments, you should set your biases aside and not abandon your principles when it happens agrees with your POV. Talk about flacky. Don’t ever presume I miss any points. People were asserting a direct comparison comparison to this Mom’s actions and the humiliation experienced by concentration camp inmates. That’s a bullshit tactic.

P.S. I’m a black male. I go bald five months every year from late spring until late August. Been doing that… oh… 15 years now. It’s. No. Big. Deal. Not when it comes to defining a parent’s actions as abusive. That said, it might be a bigger deal for some people from some cultures who place an inordinate amount of personal status to their having hair.

64

I don’t know - I think it was way over the top personally but if he was anything like my kid, then I can understand why she cracked.

My older boy is very intelligent but has the attention span of a gnat, and can NOT follow an instruction to save his life. We have never been able to play cards or board games because whenever we got them out, he’d be full of “This is MY way to play, I’ll show you MY rules” and just would not listen to how to do it properly. This affects every aspect of his life. So you can imagine how school is for him! (I pity the teacher…)

He HATES drill and “study”, and if he doesn’t understand something he’s not interested in, it’s just “I can’t do it” and he walks away. Unfortunately when it comes to maths, repetition and drill have some part in learning, and also unfortunately, being in Japan and having to learn all those characters - they have to be drilled, there is simply no other way to learn the stroke order.

So we have had sobbing, snot ridden homework times since the first grade - he is third grade now. (The teachers only set about 10 minutes a day, it’s not exactly torture, but he can spin it out for an hour of crap…)

I do sit down with him, and on good days I do even get to move to the sink and start dinner but good days are sadly few and far between at the moment. He just got a new teacher and is engaged in the usual battle of wills to see how much he can get away with. We have had six weeks so far of nothing written in his class notebooks, two line essays, scribbled on worksheets, and “lost” homework.

I have been onto it from the very beginning, asking him to show me the contents of his bag - bloody hard to do homework if he doesn’t bring anything, not even a notebook home and refuses to tell you what he did that day because he “forgot”. I gave him work to do at home anyway, and after two weeks of repeated “promises” to bring his stuff home properly, started docking his pocket money for a bag not properly ordered and brought home. (This is in addition to no TV and my own homework set…) Still no improvement.

Last week I was at my wits end, so on Thursday morning I told him he’d have to bring every single thing he’d left at school, and all his worksheets and stuff for the week, or I would smack his bottom. (I haven’t smacked him since he was little and would do things like run out in front of cars…) Well, Thursday afternoon came, and he came home worse than ever - absolutely no books, pencil case, and two important letters screwed up and scribbled on at the bottom of an empty bag. So he got smacked. It was horrible, he cried and cried but I was backed into a corner. He’s had every other punishment to no effect. On Friday night, he brought his bag home with everything in it, in good order… So the smack worked for at least 24 hours.

I have also of course spoken to his teacher, who seems unfortunately to be on the weak side. I’ve told him I expect work assigned in class to be done in class, in the same time it takes the other kids, and that the kid is to be jumped on when he starts scribbling or slacking off. And if the situation doesn’t improve I shall expect a note in his “contact book” every day of what was covered in class, so I can check to see that the work was actually done.

But this is on top of a full time job and another kid too, and I just get absolutely fed up of the same fight, day after day after day. When is he just going to accept that parts of life are boring and the best way to get over it is to knuckle down and be bored for 10 minutes or so instead of spinning it out to hours of misery for all concerned?

Sorry, this turned into a rant!

65

I don’t mean to keep harping back to this topic (as I do all too frequently) but…your description of your child has all the hallmarks of Attention Deficit Disorder. The distractability, the inability to focus, even for short periods, on a topic in which he isn’t interested (and although you don’t mention it, perhaps a paradoxical ability to focus intensely on activities he is interested in?), the forgetfulness, et cetera. IANA psychologist, and no reputable professional would make any firm diagnosis on the base of a singular description anyway, but might I suggest taking a read through Driven To Distraction and see if this doesn’t fit a few data points? And if it does, have him evaluated by a professional diagnostician (not a teacher or social worker).

If your boy does, in fact, have ADD, no amount of cajoling, harranging, punishing, shaming, et cetera is going to make it just go away, nor can he just willpower his way to maintaining attention. There are a variety of approaches to treating it–some involving pharmaceuticals, others focusing on developing coping strategies and organizational methods–that can help significantly, but punishment or shame only adds to the frustration an ADDer already feels about not being able to control their attentional focus. Even if ADD is ruled out, the extent of the problem and your frustration with not being able to affect his behavior demonstrates some significant problem above normal parent/child conflict.

No need to apologize, methinks; you provide a very pertinent example of what parents have to face with a “difficult” child, and the frustration in not just being able to easily fix the problem.

Stranger

66

He is slightly ADD, either very slightly over the line, or at the very hyper end of normal.

BUT because of where we are (Japan) there are all sorts of other issues we have to deal with, not least that this kind of stuff is about 30 years behind the west in terms of understanding. None of the teachers I have ever met have any formal training to work with special needs kids. It is regular teachers getting the problem kids dumped on them, and them struggling to the best of their ability.

Another huge problem is the societal issue of labelling - once a kid is labelled “handicapped” here, that is really it for the kid academically or even socially. It is hard to explain in a few words but the combination of these factors have led us as parents and the teachers at his school to agree to not ask for intervention as it would be more damaging for him socially than it would help him academically. (Socially he is fine.)

We have done one thing for him, which has had some negative effects for us as adults: we moved him from the local school to a smaller village school which has a unique open admissions policy. This is almost unheard of here where all kids go to the school in their district unless they pay for private school. I lost some English students and potential students from our area because we were seen as “disloyal” to move the kid out, so my business suffered (though I don’t want that type of mother sending her kid so it was for the best!!) We are not full members of our society now, but on the other hand we are involved with the village who are much nicer and more interesting so who cares? I don’t think the kid is aware of any coldness as he plays with his school mates, which means I have to drive him to playdates but he doesn’t see kids in our streets ignoring him.

The school he goes to now, STILL doesn’t have any teachers with formal training in helping kids with different problems but as the school is home to a number of “oddballs” (autistic, aspergers, very tall, very short, very thin, very fat, asthmatic, etc kids who didn’t fit in their local schools) the whole philosophy of the school is to respect and celebrate everyone’s differences, and for everyone to help each other as much as they can.

It isn’t ideal but it is the best we can do given where we live and what is available to us. The fact is he’s going to grow up and probably live here - a country that as yet does not recognise ADD and such, and will not cut him much slack for it. We have debated going to live somewhere else but it would be too damaging to the rest of our family (husband couldn’t move with his job and he’s not very marketable abroad, kids are more Japanese than anything else, we have a great house and live in a nice town, younger kid is very happy at kindy, and older kid loves his new school with a passion, even if he’s a pain in the neck about study…)

So, we plod on. If he was more thoroughly ADD then I think we’d have bigger troubles, and I do read about it and attempt to apply some of the stuff I read to our lives. (Timers, explanations, and more reason giving than I think I need to give, as he doesn’t seem to see patterns and think “Oh, if this happens, then I need to do that” so I need to make the connections more obvious for him.)

But at the end of the day he just has to buckle down, we all have to do things we don’t like, eh?

67

He sounds (and this is not any kind of expert evaluation, just an opinion) like more than “slightly over the line”; one thing about ADD is that people generally associate that pathology primarily with hyperactivity. While some manifestations of ADD do involve that characteristic, other attentional problems can be equally, if not as obviously, troublesome even in absence of hyperactivity. That, combined with the ability of ADDers to “hyperfocus” causes many to doubt the severity or even existence of that problem.

That being said, your last statement (that he needs to buckle down) is right on point; regardless of whether he suffers from that “disorder” (which I regard as being a pathologization of behavior that just doesn’t fit well in modern society) he needs to learn how to cope and work within societal and educational constraints. Tauting a label and demanding special privileges, while occasionally necessary to get appropriate help, is an ultimately self-defeating attitude.

I don’t know what to offer you other than to keep reading up on the topic and keep trying different methods until you find something that works; and to understand (and help your child understand) that it’s not his “fault”, and that while he has to be responsible for completing assignments and following rules, he should be aware of his particular challenges.

Just a brief thought, here, but in terms of studying, I know I always had difficulty focusing in the “optimal” studying environment of a quiet room with few distractions. The more isolated it is, the more my mind tends to wander and daydream. On the other hand, I’ve discovered pretty recently that when reading a book I’m able to concentrate much better with music in the background, and peculiarly enough, in a busy coffeehouse or dark, noisy (but not too crowded or overwhelming) bar. Not that you should send your kid down the road to the local pub :smiley: but perhaps his studying would be best done with a radio or music playing in the background, or broken up into two minute chunks, or somesuch. I’m blessed with an excellent memory and reading speed, which is good because when I have to study something I’m not interested in my focus only remains for three to four minutes, tops, and I have to alternate between reading and doing something else (er, like posting to SDMB, recently. :slight_smile: ) My point is, keep trying different strategies, even some that may seem contraindicated, until you find something that works.

Stranger

68

I sure wish all of you would have posted if you have kids when you voiced your approval or disapproval of this punishment tactic.

I love it when people who don’t have kids voice an opinion of how to properly raise kids.

E3

69

I have a daughter, although I would say that since all of us have been children, we have some personal insight into how children should be raised. The old, “You’ll understand when you have children,” is a dodge and in my experience completely untrue. I am less understanding now that I have a child of my own of many choices in child rearing that I did not agree with even before I had my own child. I base my comments in this thread from my own experience, on what I have read, on what I think I would do, and what I have seen and heard from others around me. Would you limit comments to parents? to parents who have had children that age? or to only parents who have had children with similar problems?

Snarky comments impying that non-parents have no insight in how to raise childen do nothing to look at what happened, whether it was right, and whether it will be helpful or hurtful.

I think what that mother did was not appropriate and will hurt her long term relationship with her son. I think it unwise to humiliate someone so severly who might one day be in a position to choose your nursing home. I think there are better ways to handle the situation, and some very good examples have been given in this thread.

70

So, lee, it’s your contention this single act of head-shaving was so singularly tramuatizing and humiliating that it will negate all the love and care he has for his mother and cause this child to nurse a grudge for the next few decades so deep that eventually he’ll stick her in a shitty nursing home?

If ever there was a time for a 10" “rolleyes” smiley icon, this is it.

… meanwhile, we’ve got Stranger on the Train doing online diagnoses based on secondhand information of a child he’s never met to a parent he’s never met for a condition he has no training in. (Ignoring the fact that Hokkaido Brit already said her kid was slightly ADD – Stranger has to dispute this. Yeesh.) He was doing so well when he suggested a professional diagnostician, too. BTW, here in the States it’s perfectly normal for a teacher or social worker or BOTH to do an initial ADHD diagnoses before a making a referral to the professional behaviorist, so don’t be surprised if that ever happens.

No one here, not even me, has proof this situation was anything more than a single instance of a frustrated mother following through on a consequence with a non-traditional punishment, based on the information presented so far. Certainly no one’s proven it’s abusive or humiliating. It’s far too soon to speculate what, if any, feelings of resentment may or may not stem from this. It damn sure isn’t anything like the fucking Nazis.

No kids. An uncle of three nieces and nephews and about five second cousins under age of 12. Oh, and five years experience in early childhood education as a an inner-city kindergarten teacher.

71

I am saying that such an action can negate any trust, not necessarily that it has, although a 10 or 11 year old boy crying for hours seems to indicate that it might have. I think parents would be wise to consider the lasting effects of their actions on children, especially when taking deliberate irreversible actions. Some parents do things that they claim are for the children’s good, but are not really helpful in anyway and may be harmful to the child or the parents relationship with the child. This action is about on par with a parent who doesn’t want their child to waste their life trying to be an artist or designer throwing out a portfolio of their works or a parent who feels their child is not really capable of handling life away from home yet due to a disability taking their college applications out of the mailbox and discarding it without telling the child. All are acts done by parents for the good of the child that have the potential of ending any trust.

72

Well, if it’s part of a pattern of her letting things slide, stewing in silence, and then, when she’s tried nothing and is all out of ideas, blowing up, the head-shaving won’t help.

73

**Rilchiam. ** “Letting things slide?” “Stewing in silence?” “Tried nothing and is all out of ideas?” “blowing up?” Are we reading the same thread?

and

Where do you see her ignoring, stewing or being silent about the situation?

Clearly she hadn’t run out of ideas, because she hadn’t abusively beat her kid or abandoned him. Just because you don’t approve of a strategy doesn’t make it wrong.

74

Well, she “believed” that he’d done his homework instead of checking on him. And she took away privileges instead of supervising him.

75

Well, that’s better.

You’re describing the difference between authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles – not right or wrong, not certainly not abusive or humiliating. It was severe. It was harsh. But it was consistent in that something else was taken away.

76

Unless you read the situation as I did.

My initial reaction to the OP was similar to those who noted the disconnect between the infraction and the consequence. Generally, we want consequences to relate directly to behaviors if we want the kid to accomplish objective #1 of effective discipline: **The child will take responsibility for his/her own behaviors. ** Meting out random or outrageous punishments which have no relation to the targeted behaviors is confusing, and likely to have adverse results like resentment rather than compliance and growth of personal responsibility.

However, once I read that the mother has some military experience I assumed she took a military tack with him, and (since I’m a parent and tend to give fellow parents the benefit of the doubt) also assumed she had shared the new order with her son. I can easily see military school as a logical consequence for repeated school-related misbehaviors, and I can appreciate the mother’s desire to make sure her son knew she wasn’t shitting with him by giving him a little taste of the ultimate consequence. Thus, the head gets shaved. Lie to me again about school assignments and you’ll get your next haircut from Sarge.

77

That’s the thing that makes my spidey-sense tingle here. It’s not that shaving a kid’s head seems like such a horrible thing to do - it’ll grow back, and it’s not the worst humiliation a kid has ever suffered. But it has nothing to do with the problem. Shouldn’t the consequences at least be sort of related to the action? Why would humiliating a kid help in this circumstance?

It’s not like it’s ultimate suffering we’re talking about, but it’s such a bizarre response that it makes me think the situation is something more than we know about. At the least, it seems like mom is a little unhinged (which may be part of why the kid’s a problem in the first place.) You can punish and punish and punish, but isn’t it more effective to take a proactive approach and try to figure out what the problem is?

Was the problem that he was spending too much time gazing at it in the mirror? Because those are the only two possibilities I can think of.

“All my dreams have to do with combing my hair!” - Armand Tanzarian, The Simpsons

Like I said, it’s not like it’s something the kid won’t survive mentally. But I think a lot of us are responding to the gut feeling that it seems like a weird, sorta crazyish response to the problem. It just makes no sense to me as a punishment, so it makes me think there’s something off about the woman.

No, it’s not. It’s a bullshit tactic when the comparison is something like, “You know who was a vegetarian? Hitler, that’s who! Therefore, PETA is a bunch of Nazis!” The concentration camp example was used in an argument, along with other examples, of the fact that cutting off someone’s hair has a great deal of cultural or psychological significance. (And I think it’s different for black people, assuming this kid was white. A lot of black men go around with shaved heads; it’s a pretty normal fashion choice. It’s much less normal for white men.) It’s a bullshit argument when you falsely compare someone to the Nazis. But no one was saying this woman was like a Nazi; they were just using factual information about the Nazi regime to support a specific point - that shaving a person’s head is a heavy and psychologically significant act.

I was gonna ask if the kid had ADD too, as he sounds a lot like little Excalibre.

Anyway, I understand the difficulties you see in obtaining treatment, but if this is your attitude, I feel sorry for your kid, and if he’s got ADD, it’s going to have major life consequences no matter how much he tries to “buckle down”. It just doesn’t go away from sheer trying. You owe it to your kid to at least get a book and try some of the organizational approaches to the problem. I have ADD, and I can tell you that the consequences of untreated ADD are not attractive. If the kid has it, not treating the condition is really condemning him to a lot of years of heartache and your whole family to a lot of struggles.

Obviously, though, pharmacology and psychology have not always existed. It’s not like it’s an insurmountable problem if you understand it and have the knowledge to help the kid out. I really recommend looking for some literature on it. Stranger’s recommendation of Driven to Distraction is a good start. There are major organization steps you can take, and approaches to minimize the bad family dynamics that tend to result from it. Helping the kid establish techniques for concentrating and getting his homework done will help both him and your family (since the struggles surrounding those issues in teenagers tend to affect everyone in the family.) You want to do this early on, before any sort of negative attitude towards school develops (it’s easy to develop a negative attitude when no matter how hard you try, you inevitably screw up.) Please find some books and work out non-medical approaches to it. Not being a psychological condition per se, it lends itself well to structural life changes.

Wise words. I told my mother that many times as a teenager.

78

I didn’t read the whole thread, so I apologize if this has already been said.

If the kid is not doing homework, then there is something going on inside the kids head. Unfortunately, shaving the head does not get you closer to seeing inside the head, but going to a counselor might.

As a parent of 3, including a middle child that we took to a counselor due to much arguing and angry behavior (after our divorce), I would have to say that in our case it worked. Talking through issues can be very helpful.

79

As a teacher, I don’t see this helping the situation at all.
For example, the next class this kid attends will spend ages asking what happened, discussing it and staring at him.

At school we explain potential punishments, and make them related to the offence, so the kids understand the point we’re making. As has been stated, shaving the child’s head basically shows that they are powerless. It is far more likely to build resentment rather than repentance.

I think the key point for me is that the mother didn’t know her son wasn’t doing his homework.
Now you should certainly start by trusting your kid. But once the teacher alerts you to work not being done, then you need to check. Our younger kids have a homework book and timetable, which the parents can use to see whether the work is being done.
Why didn’t this mother sit with her son and encourage him to do the work? Why doesn’t she know what problem(s) he has (laziness / dsylexia / belligerence / bad teaching)?