Clan Donaldson

Cari Donaldson

Cari Donaldson

Mohawks and Personal Expression

by Cari Donaldson on May 31, 2012 · 4 comments

Movies and TV shows are held to even more stringent standards.  It’s one thing to read about a pirate running somebody through- it’s another thing to see it.  It’s also another thing to see someone being run through, and you try to process it with a nerf sword and a sibling, it’s another thing to see two naked people in bed together, leaving you relatively few ways to deal with the images.  This means the kids can watch Knight’s Tale, but we skip over the sex scene.  They can watch kung-fu cartoons, but nothing featuring seances or demonic possession (which, sadly and shockingly, rules out Scooby Doo.  Scooby Doo, for those of you thinking of the Scooby Doo of your youth, was given a whole new series which rendered him unsuitable).

For the love of God, Donaldson, what does all this convey other than the fact that you and Ken may have parental standards, but they’re inconsistent and capricious?  And how does it tie in to mohawks?

Easy.

Out of the many ways people generally express individuality, hair is the one area where our kids have free reign.  As I say every single time I sit down in the beautician’s chair, “It’s just hair.  It’ll grow back.”  And so it is here at home.  You want a mohawk?  Ok.  You want to dye your hair pink?  Sure.  I find no issues with modesty, demonic activity, or corruption of morals in one’s hair style.  It’s just hair.  It’ll grow back.

One of the kids’ first lessons in a literal, and not literalist, reading of the Bible comes with the Sampson story.  The story is literally about God marking Sampson in a special way from conception, and the hair was the outward sign of that inward mark.  A literalist reading of the story would think that the power came from the hair, and then draw all sorts of odd notions about the dangers of cutting one’s hair.  It would miss the point that the hair was a marker of where Sampson’s loyalties were- with God, or with man.

So that’s the happy medium we’ve come up with here: clothing, music, movie and book choices that reflect your loyalty to God and the standards of your parents, and hair that you can style any way you want to reflect your God-given individuality.  Of course, all of ours are still young, and so things will change as they get older, but for right now, it’s a system everyone can live with.

What about you?  How do you balance your kids’ need for personal expression with the standards of your household?

 

 

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Cari Donaldson
Cari Donaldson stepped through the looking glass when she married her high school sweetheart in a Presbyterian ceremony back in 1999. Since then, she and her husband have found themselves the parents of six children, and on the corporate gypsy trail, with transfers moving them from the Midwest to the deep South to New England. The most startling developments however, have been the conversion to Catholicism in 2006, and the discovery that blogging provides an excellent creative outlet. You can find Cari on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/clan.donaldson and Twitter at @CariDonaldson and here on Catholic Exchange.

Tagged as: children, hair, mohawks, Sampson, snakeskin jacket

  • Dwija Borobia

    I think my kids aren’t old enough to have preferences for things that are not our preferences for things, ya know? One of my daughters is more girly and the other one is more tomboyish, but nothing inappropriate has ever been suggested, so we haven’t really had to lay down any laws.

    But with (soon to be ) 4 girls, it’s only a matter of time….

  • micaela

    My parents always *said* we could do our hair however we wanted, but then I asked for a perm when I was 12 and they said no. By the time they came around I was over it (to be more accurate, perms were “out”) and I was glad I didn’t have one. I suspect it was all a part of their diabolical plan to raise me as a healthy and whole person with few personal regrets HAHA! I’m guessing my tongue, nose, and belly button piercings in college gave them many sleepless nights. But my argument was always, “It’s not a tattoo. I can take them out whenever I want.” And I did. Where do you stand on piercings, Cari?

    That said, my parents were pretty chill about all other hair requests. A few of my brothers sported Mohawks, they all had hippie hair at one point, and my oldest brother even had a mullet. Made ever more striking by his naturally bright red hair. Oy vey.

    The real thing I care about is modesty as well. Trying to instill that in this culture is haaaaaaaaarrrrrrd. (Whiny voice)

  • chaco

    I hold that kids can’t process abstract thought (Gray) until a certain age. They can only process Black & White. If we subject them to too much abstract, it can nurture the confused mindset of Relativism; “There is no Truth except what is RELATIVE to one’s own appetites or experiences.” I feel so fortunate to have grown up in an environment of Andy Griffith/ Mayberry RFD, Bonanza, My 3 Sons, Daniel Boone etc. where there was always a clear-cut distinction between Black & White – Good & Evil. Our home schooled, ages 23, 21 & 17 got alot of Beatles & other 60s music. Our oldest girl loves “I Love Lucy” shows and our boy loves John Wayne. [Did you know he had a Death Bed conversion to Catholicism ?] Such materials didn’t hinder their ability to process more recent cultural norms, but I think it helped to prevent their falling prey to what a recent Pope said was the greatest sin of our age; “The belief that there is no such thing as sin.”

  • http://b-moviecat.blogspot.com/ EegahInc

    At our house we drew the line on fashion statements that had certain philosophies attached to them. When the parents of one of my daughter’s friends bought MY DAUGHTER short shorts with phrases like “spoiled rotten” and “hot stuff” printed across the rear, we happily embarassed her by making her return them. And then we spent two years of middle school denying her the right to be a goth because of the nihilistic message that came with the outfits. In high school, however, when she decided to create her own unique (and often dreadful) look by assembling stuff from thrift stores, we just let her go for it because there’s no inherently evil message in having bad fashion sense.