In Tears Over a Haircut: Bullies Wear Buzz Cuts.

by Abby Margolis Newman (Saving One Teen at a Time)

Two days ago, my 11-year-old son, Henry, got his first buzz cut, and I cried my eyes out about it. "It's just hair," my husband said in an attempt to console me, "it'll grow back." I know this, and yet I feel devastated by this loss. What's going on here?

The youngest of three brothers, Henry has never liked his hair. First of all, it's red, and in the post-"South Park" era of denigrating so-called "Gingers," it's already tough in 21st-century America to be red-haired and therefore different. Secondly, his hair has always been wavy - I remember the beautiful red curls he had as a baby, the same curls which are now enshrined in a clear Ziploc bag clipped into his baby book, a remnant of his first haircut. (I'm afraid to look at them for fear it'll send me right over the edge again.) Henry has always wished for straight hair, darker skin, fewer freckles. When you're a tween, the last thing you want is to stand out in any way.

Occasionally, when expressing his annoyance about his hair acting uncooperatively, he'd ask about getting a buzz cut (a few of his friends had already done it). I always said no, then veered to another topic. To me, buzz cuts (the "crew cuts" of my youth) have such strong negative connotations: they're militaristic. They make me think of Nazis, of mean ex-marines (think Chris Cooper in "American Beauty"), of bullies. The thought of Henry, my sweet-natured baby, with a buzz cut was just too jarring - like cognitive dissonance, it just felt wrong.

Then in June, for the second year in a row, Henry was voted onto the baseball "All-Stars" team in our California town. My friend Lisa called me a few days ago and said, "I didn't want you to be blindsided by this news, so I thought I'd warn you: all the boys on the team are getting buzz cuts tomorrow. I guess it's a 'team spirit' thing." And sure enough, Henry came home from practice that day, bursting with the buzz-cut news, begging me to say yes. Even though I knew the inevitable conclusion to this story, I said I'd need to think about it.

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Saving the World One Teen at a Time is a weekly column about navigating the tween-teen years in an increasingly thorny, competitive and tech-dominated world, written by two women with super-hero insights. Kristy Campbell is a mom of 5 (1 teen, tween twins, 1 pre-tween, 1 toddler) and works as an actress and social media consultant. She is currently writing her guide on how to survive the modern mom's midlife crisis. Abby Margolis Newman is a mom of two teenage sons, and one prematurely teenage 10-year-old son. She has written feature stories for the New York Times, and articles for Parenting, Working Mother, and Scholastic, among many other publications.