Your Daughter Will Probably Not Like Her Natural Hair At Some Point - But That’s

Natural hair, natural hair. We talk about you way too much yet there’s still so much more left to say! First off I would like to apologize for the title. While I believe it to be mostly true, it is also clearly attention seeking and for that reason, I am sorry but now that you are here…

For those of you who are blessed with little girls of your own, you will know the internal dialogue accompanied with constant decision making that helps us find a balance between natural hair, work life, and other responsibilities while trying to remain good moms.

I’m going to get into specifics here with my own personal experiences. My daughter Jasmine was born almost 7 years ago now. She is a vibrant, funny and [insert every heartwarming word that any mom uses to describe their daughters here] little girl. She can be a bit shy around new people at first but most who know her see her as confident and feisty for someone of her age.

The fascination with long hair begins

A few years ago I noticed that she had a fascination with long hair. I am, as you may well know, in the hair care business (blogs, products etc) so I’m constantly looking at images of hair on my computer or my iPad and often Jasmine will be sitting on my lap as I work. At the time, I noticed that she would pipe up with comments like “She’s pretty” or “Wow I like her hair!”. I noticed that these comments would mostly be muttered when there was a woman with long straight hair on the screen.

After some amateur experimentation showing her different women with different textures and lengths, I noticed that she didn’t really mind if the hair was long and straight or long and curly if it was long then Jasmine thought the lady was pretty. Phew! I thought, perhaps she just likes long hair like every other little girl in the world. Straight hair didn’t seem to matter much at the time.

I have been natural since before she was born so I believed the promise that a child brought up with a natural mommy who loves her curls automatically grows up confident and loving her natural hair by default. Jasmine is a very girly girl and even when she was younger she instinctively knew that hair was important to me and it has somehow become quite important to her as well.

Fast forward to today, she is almost 7 and in primary school and has a best friend who we will call M, is a lovely little white girl with long brown hair. Jasmine and M have been absolutely inseparable since they started school and they make the cutest pair.

Why is my hair curly?

Since starting primary school Jasmine has asked me often why her hair is curly while her friend M’s hair is straight. Without trying to explain genetics to her, which she wouldn’t care about anyway, my favorite answer is to say that her hair loves to be curly and M’s hair loves to be straight. I explained to her that if she straightens her hair with a flat iron* and then she wets it, it will go back to curly because it just LOVES to be curly. On the other hand, if her friend M curls her hair with a curling iron* and then wets it, it will go back to being straight because her hair LOVES to be straight. Simple and straightforward. I know that she understands the mechanics of the matter but intellectually I see that she still struggles with it. “But why” being the often sounded response.

Eventually, I just started saying that “Curly hair is the best” to bring home the point that not only did mommy prefer curly hair but it is also something good and enviable to have. This is an often repeated phrase in our household and even Jasmine says this sometimes. I have on occasion heard her explaining it to her dolls while playing #cutenessoverload.

Popular media

Anyway if you have a daughter/niece/friend’s child yourself you may remember the craze of Frozen a few years ago and how annoying the song Let it go became after a while. Of course, at the time only an Elsa or Anna doll would do for Christmas and I would be willing to wager that no black parent would have denied their little girls the blonde Anna doll at the time.

Yet feeling myself teetering on the wrong side of the balancing act that is black motherhood, I decided at the same time to purchase the only reasonably priced black barbie that I could find on Amazon, I remember thinking that she looked more Latina than black with her long straight hair and lightly tanned skin but I digress.

‘Black’ Barbie didn’t get nearly as much playtime as Elsa or Anna did and while her most of her body has now been relegated to the bottom of the toy box, one of her arms got lost and probably now resides in a landfill somewhere. Elsa and Anna, of course, remain in pristine condition. It is even part of mommy duty to put aside a day every few months to wash and re-straighten all the dolls’ hair. #mommyproblems

After the craze of Frozen died down my daughter then went crazy for MLP (My Little Pony) and even now it’s all she ever watches on TV or youtube. You will notice that even though they are basically cute little horses, they are clearly based on ‘white standards of beauty’. Blue and green eyes and mostly long straight manes.

When it comes to the dolls that she wants to play with these days, it is the Equestria girls, the ‘human’ versions of MLP below who despite their blue, orange and purple skin tones are clearly based on white girls.

Now I could complain that our kids are not being represented in poplar media which is true in many respects. I mean it wouldn’t take much for them to add a brown Equestria girl doll with curly hair to their lineup above would it? I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that most horses are brown anyway aren’t they? AREN’T THEY??

Yet as a business woman I understand that when creating a product you want it to appeal to the large majority of the population and for us who live in the US or the UK, that majority is white. By extension, products targeted to us are afterthoughts and not a major part of their marketing flow. I mean how long did it take Disney to finally get a black princess in their lineup?

We now have dolls that look like our little girls

Recently when Barbie brought out the line of ‘Fashionista’ dolls including curvier dolls and proper black girls with curly hair I was ecstatic to see them on Amazon and immediately purchased two. A game changer I thought, but my excitement was soon proved to be unfounded when Jasmine quickly relegated them to the toy box within the first week. I expect that they will be keeping ‘black’ Barbie’s arms company in a landfill somewhere in the near future. #sigh

Back to hair, as a mom, I don’t like to be too stringent with my daughter’s hair care. For school, which is the great majority of the average year, I give Jasmine the choice of wearing her hair twisted into plaits, pigtails, mini twists or braids and cornrows, you know, typical little girl hairstyles. During the school holidays I may let her wear her hair loose a couple of times but for the most part, she gets hair straightened twice a year. On her birthday and for the end of year school disco just before Christmas. It’s the easiest way that I find to deal with our two heads of natural hair while still trying to show her that her hair is, in fact, versatile and fun.

With my own haircare, I’m a typical mom myself. I go through periods of keeping my hair straight for a few weeks at a time but for the most part, I wear it curly and I only wear hair extensions* infrequently. I am constantly aware of the scrutiny that I get from Jasmine anytime I do anything different with my hair and she has no qualms about letting me know if she doesn’t like my new hairstyle