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24th July 2023
10:17am BST
A dad has gone viral for controversially taking his eight-year-old daughter to get her head shaved even though his wife begged him not to.
However, the man has been praised by many on Reddit after explaining the decision.
Reddit user 'aitathrowaway795939' posted in the now infamous AITA subreddit, to explain his decision. He said that his daughter (called Anna for the purposes of his story) has 'very thick, blonde and curly hair that my wife adores.'
He says his wife would spend hours styling the hair, using all sorts of products to do so. However, the catch is that he claims his daughter doesn't particularly enjoy getting her hair done and hates having to sit still for more than a few minutes.
The user wrote: "Before she got it cut, her hair used to reach past her waist. And while it looked lovely, she hated getting it brushed and every morning used to be a screaming fest between her and my wife.
"Lately, she'd been begging for a shorter haircut. My wife ignored her whenever the topic was brought up in hopes that she'd forget about it, but none of that ended up happening."
Inevitably, Anna ended up asking her dad, and he drove her to the hairdresser where she chose a clipper cut. After the cut, Anna was apparently over the moon and could not stop smiling.
She even went round the salon showing off the new do, and asked her dad to take a bunch of pictures.
However, all was not well when his wife returned home from work.
He wrote: "She refused to even look at Anna, locked herself in her room and cried then got in the car and drove off. It's been a day now and she's still not back... The kid's upset too and no matter how much I reassure her she still thinks she's in trouble for getting her hair cut."
Understandably, Reddit users came down on different sides of the debate, with some calling out the mother's response as a troubling reaction to something she didn't like. Others have pointed out the issues is about Anna's body autonomy and allowing her to do what she wants with her own hair.
Others say that while the dad was right for allowing the child to have a say in her own hair, he shouldn't have done this behind his wife's back.
One user has said nobody comes off particularly well in this tale, and that the child is suffering as a result of the breakdown in communication between the two parents.
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