‘I Think They’re Wondering If She’s Sick’: Mother Reveals Why She Shaved Her 6-Year-Old Daughter’s Head Bald

The mother of a 6-year-old girl, Paige Lucas-Stannard of Salem, Ohio, made a difficult decision when she allowed her daughter, Aellyn, to shave her head bald just as she had seen her father and brother do plenty of times before.

Moment mother let her daughter, 6, shave her head because she wanted to look like her father: Paige Lucas-Stan… http://t.co/TSmsVkxzAE

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After seeing her father, Pete, and her brother shave their heads, little Aellyn desperately wanted to do the same. So she’d constantly asked her mother — who was initially against the shaving — to allow it, according to Today.

Remembering the book she had written called Gender Neutral Parenting, which discusses gender stereotypes, she finally agreed and allowed her daughter to shave her head.

“We talk about sexism a lot and I told her [Aellyn] the morning before we cut it that some people think girls shouldn’t have shaved heads,” Paige said.

“She said, ‘no way. Girls can have their hair anyway they want’. I said, I know, but some people might call her a boy. She said: ‘That’s ok mom, I’ll just tell them I’m a girl.'”

Paige and her husband thought that shaving their daughter’s hair off could be an inspirational moment. So they recorded their daughter as she was getting her hair shaved off, then afterwards posted it on their blog Baby Dust Diaries.

However, not everyone was pleased with Paige’s decision to allow her daughter to shave their head. One user wrote, “This is like telling your kids they can dress however they like at a country club.”

“They will be stopped at the door and told to dress by the guidelines. As liberating and free thought as you think you are, there is the harsh reality of cultural norms that tell you how to act and look.”

“I will prepare my kids for reality and no sure them as a social experiment and post them online to push my personal agenda and to build my ego.”

Other users found it to be “amazing” and claimed that “the conditioning is hard to fight but we have to if we want a better place for our kids to live.”

Although it’s been weeks since Aellyn had cut her hair off, no one has even mentioned the fact that she had shave off her hair. Paige said it saddens her that her community would rather remain quiet and give unpleasant stares in lieu of accepting her.

“I think they are wondering if she is sick. I think that is sad,” said Paige. “It’s so rare that a girl would shave her head.”

In her blog, Paige stated that she agreed to shave her daughter’s hair because it was fun for her, and she doesn’t regret it.

“The idea of regretting something as stupid as hair would probably never cross her [Aellyn] mind. To her, this was fun!

[Image courtesy of Nicki Mannix/Flickr]