Parents: Should your teenager get permission before changing their appearance?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So my friend sent her son (13) to the el cheapo hair salon (within walking distance) with $20 to get his hair cut. He came back with a kewl Beckham-style cut, and with blond streaks (his hair’s light brown).

Friend: :dubious: “How much extra did that cost?”

Son: “I made up the difference with my own money.”

Friend: “…Well, it looks good.”

Grandma: “She didn’t know you were going to do that?”

Son: “I didn’t think of it until I got there. They did highlights on this other guy, and I thought it looked cool, so I asked how much extra, and they did it.”

Grandma: “Well, they should have called and made sure it was okay with your mother! You’re a minor; they can’t do that without a parent’s permission!”

Son: “They didn’t ask.”

Grandma: “Well, YOU should have asked! [to Friend] You would have said no, wouldn’t you?”

Friend: “…I don’t know. Anyway, it’s okay; no harm done.”

Grandma: “No harm done?! That’s going to have to grow out! They shouldn’t have done that without permission! YOU shouldn’t have done that without permission! You couldn’t get a piercing or a tattoo without permission; hair is the same thing! I’m never going to that salon again! I can’t believe you disrespected your mother like that…”

I dunno. Personally, I think Grandma is stuck in the '70s. Blond streaks are pretty low on the scale of outrageous appearance changes. Piercings and tattoos are age-restricted because of the liability issues, but I’ve never heard of an infected highlighting.

Still, it is a change. Not as drastic or politically fraught as getting his head shaved (I think I’d want to know about that, and the motivation behind it), but a change that he made on a whim. So, would you have wanted your kid to call and ask for permission to get blond streaks? Or any other change?

2

I would like to be consulted, but I wouldn’t expect it, nor would I have been that upset. However, I would *pretend *to be outraged. :wink:

Seriously. I watched my stepmom go through this with my brother. He stopped combing his hair. She said nothing. So he stopped getting haircuts. She said nothing. Finally he stopped washing his hair, and she finally spoke up, and THAT became the source of contention for the last 5 years he lived in her home.

She told me later, “If I had just pretended to be annoyed when he stopped combing his hair, he’d have gotten his need to rebel met in a safe, non-disgusting manner.”

She’s a wise woman.

3

Crazy. Hair grows out, and almost nothing you can do to your hair is permanent. If you can’t screw it up when you’re 13, when can you?

Tattoos and piercings are a little different - tattoos are permanent(ish), and piercings require a fair amount of care to keep clean and safe. I can see requiring parental permission before a 13 year old gets one of those, but a haircut is nothing.

4

Hair is not the same thing. Even piercings aren’t forever, although the scarring might be. Tattoos may carry hepatitis risks but there are no health issues I can think of related to a salon cut/color.

5

Highlights? Those are a problem? Hair grows out, it’s not like he wanted anything really outrageous. I think Grandma overreacted, especially as he paid for it himself.

6

I am totally with you on this one…I think what teenagers want more than anything is to shock their parents. Feign schock from something that’s no big deal, and you may be heading some major rebellion off at the pass!

But no, I have always said that hair stuff wouldn’t bother me (hey, I was a teen in the '80s…a key time for scary hair!) As long as the change isn’t permanent, I can live with it.

7

Yeah, really, whatever…it’s just hair. Grandma’s definitely stuck in some earlier time.

There’s a phase in everyone’s life when you can get away with being risky and wild and trying new looks on for size…and it’s called being a teenager. Either the kid will look back someday and laugh at himself for looking like such a goon (some 95% of us do this as adults) or he’ll look back fondly and remember his mom letting him get a cool hair-do. Whatever.

8

I don’t think it’s a big deal to do something like that. I mean, hair is minor stuff! Now, when my oldest daughter showed up at age 17 with a home-made tattoo, that bothered me. But hair? Meh. No biggie.

9

You also are a wise woman!

I think grandma was overreacting. Mom should sit him down and tell him that she’d prefer that they discuss this together in the future, maybe with the incentive that she’ll help pay for it if she thinks it’s something cool (all this assuming she wants to do that).

Not a big deal though.

10

I agree re: the wanting to shock. He certainly did get a reaction out of Grandma!

I saw his new hair yesterday, when Friend sent him over to return my potato-peeling gadget. My reaction was “Whoa! Bend it like Beckham, man!” But that’s a non-parent reaction; I’m not one of the people he wants to get a rise out of. Then today, Friend calls me and tells me of Grandma’s reaction on Saturday.

See, the way she tells it, her mom seemed convinced that the salon had done something actionable, almost on par with selling alcohol to a minor. Friend told her that she could go ahead and boycott the salon if she wanted to, but they’d done nothing illegal, so don’t be ridiculous.

Also, what I didn’t want to mention in the OP, for fear of derailing the thread before it got started, is that the heart of the matter may be “It makes him look like a [whisper]homosexual!![/whisper]” Stuck in the '70s, indeed.

11

Apparently the grandmother was never around a child like Queen Bruin. I would come home from work, and she’d have a green and/or pink mohawk, and new piercings that she did herself with safety pins :eek: . When we went to get her first learner’s permit, the guy at the DMV couldn’t decide what color to call her hair. I think he finally settled on red.

I only got upset when she shaved off her eyebrows. That was *really *unattractive!

12

I think that’s a relatively small subset of mostly maladjusted teenagers. What 90% of teenagers want is to dress like every other teenager. Their look tends to be sloppy or casual, but I find little about how teenagers dress to be shocking.

The issue isn’t about asking parents permission to wear a certain style or get a particular haircut. If a kid selects a particular style that looks outlandish (like a mohawk or getting his head shaved), is permenant (like a brand or tatoo) and/or is dangerous (like sticking safety pins in his face), you might want to find out what their issue is. He might have shaved his head because he joined the swim team, because he lost a bet with a friend or because someone has to stop those Jews from taking over. Best to find out which.

And who gives a shit what grandma thinks? You’re going to take an 80 year old woman’s advice about fashion?

13

I wouldn’t disagree with that. Maybe “shock” is too harsh of a word…I just mean that a lot of fashions that teens get just to be like their friends are the kinds of things that get the eye-roll from parents. For example, when I was in HS, the asymetrical look was big with us girls…shaved close over the ear on one side, pageboy-long on the other, or weird color tints or highlighting. None of this is what I would consider “outlandish,” or qualify us for an immediate drug test, but it wasn’t exactly how my mom would have wanted my hair to look, either.

These days, the hair doesn’t seem to be a big deal, but kids are into the super-sloppy look, as you mention…going out in pajama bottoms & other things that would also elicit the eye-roll or comments from mom, but not anything that would freak a parent out.

I just think, similar to WhyNot, that it never hurts for a parent to let a kid know that they may be getting close to the line of what’s acceptable, in order to keep them from crossing over it in the attempt to get some kind of reaction.

14

Which, as I said, is probably what she was really getting at. Blond highlights → possibly gay, in her mind. Her generation (see below) didn’t really accept that there are homosexuals in society until they were forced to by the gay rights movement in the 1970s, so she may be conditioned to think that anything other than short-back-and-sides is gay. As such, the parental permission issue may have been a smoke screen. Or she may believe so strongly in it-takes-a-village that she honestly thought the hairdresser was out of line for failing to say, “Wait…are you sure your mom is okay with this?”

She’s only in her late fifties. Still, that would put her teen years in the mid-to-late 1960s. Unless she was super-conservative, she was probably rocking the miniskirts, to her own parents’ dismay, and perhaps ironing her hair as well. The more things change.

15

Like many parents, I’d like to be consulted, but what my teenagers do with their hair (as long as it doesn’t violate school dress codes) is up to them.

This is exactly what I thought when I read how extreme her reaction was. I know my own mom (who was a teen in the forties) was scandalized when my best friend dyed her hair blonde (in the 70s) - because only “loose” girls dye their hair. She’s caught up with the times a bit since then, so I doubt her granddaughters’ coloring hair would raise an eyebrow. A well-placed piercing or a tattoo, on the other hand, certainly could.

16

Add another vote to the no big deal side. Kid paid the extra cost out of his own pocket, and even if the parent hates it, it will grow out. As teen rebellion goes, this seems as minor as it gets.

17

Right. Anything permanent,and you have to get permision. Hair cuts will grow out.

But if you do not want your teen doing something like that (something that pisses you off but isn’t IMPORTANT like drug use) then whateverthefuck you do, do not yell at them or lecture them. They are being rebellious and that’s exactly what they want.

Laught at them. I mean, really laugh- think of something funny. Then call your hubby why the kid is listening and tell him “Hon, you got to (snerk) see the new (snicker) hair cut (chuckle) that Bobby spent his money on.”

18

I think Grandma needs to mind her own business. This is an issue of the individual parents’ discretion. I mean… it’s just hair.

19

So long as the teen in question doesn’t expect to change his/her whole wardrobe in one go and the parental units to pay for it, no. It’s not like God flips the Magical Switch in the sky when you turn 18, taking responsibility for how you look and for your good and bad choices of hairdresser is part of the whole growing up business.

Mind you, I used to have the opposite fight: Mom wanted me to have a perm and I didn’t want to (I did get one and she had to admit I’d been right, she’s stuck to her promise of never saying “perm” in my presence again).

20

Something as “low profile” as getting a more daring but still quite mainstream haircut or highlights isn’t even a “get a rise out of your parents” thing. Lilbro once was delaying going to the barber, Mom and Dad were getting a rise out of it… and the Ancient Sister (that’s moi) noticed that his hand would go to the back of his neck every time the issue came up and said “what, you’re trying to see how the curls look?” " :o yes…" The parentals were so freaked out and so unwilling to let him talk that he couldn’t get a word in edgewise to explain.

As a kid, Lilbro was one of those blue-eyed cherubs with the golden curls. Now the hair is more ash-blonde, but it still gets curly if it’s long enough :smiley: Once he’d seen how it looked and decided he didn’t like it, he went back to his regular once-a-month schedule.