This Dad Figured Out How To Make A Ponytail And Let Me Be The First To Say ‘Big Deal’
It isn’t every day we heap mountains of praise on fathers for completing simple tasks that fall under the requirements of basic childcare.
Oh wait, yes it is.
Today’s unnecessary praise comes to us courtesy of The Huffington Post, which ran a feature about a single dad named Greg Wickherst who completed the monumental task of learning how to fix his own daughter’s hair.
Like most of us, Greg was not adept at styling another human’s hair, especially when that other human is a rambunctious toddler.Greg had an advantage some of us don’t have, though:
The dad works as an admissions representative at the IntelliTec College, which luckily, has a cosmetology department. Last summer, Greg visited the department to ask students to help him out.
So Greg works for a trade school with a cosmetology department and asked for help. That is both logical and convenient. It’s likely that if Greg hadn’t worked at the trade school he would’ve asked someone else for help, or maybe even Googled it. That is a thing that parents are supposed to do. We need to take care of our kids, so when we don’t know how to do something we must seek answers and ask for help.
Greg isn’t just a parent, though. Greg is a father. Where I – a mere mother – might have been born with innate braiding skills (spoiler: I was not born with innate braiding skills) or just been expected to figure it out because that’s my damn job, Greg deserves all the gold stars. In fact, The Huffington Post writes in their headline that Greg “went to cosmetology school” to learn how to do his daughter’s hair because that is exactly the same thing as asking a cosmetology student how to do a braid. Someone should get him some sort of certificate. Oh, I also counted more than one comment lauding him as “Dad Of The Year,” so perhaps we should also have a trophy made.
Look, I understand women probably spend more time dealing with long hair than men do, and he learned how to do some cute stuff, but seriously? You are not the world’s most wonderful parent because you learned how to complete a basic childcare skill, even if your child happens to be of a different sex than you. I’m all for praising involved fathers, but our standards for dads are embarrassingly low. Men are celebrated for stepping even a centimeter outside of their comfort zones when parenting, while women are just expected to take on whatever comes our way and excel in all areas of childrearing, whether we’re in familiar territory or not. I’m glad this dad learned how to do his kid’s hair. I wish we lived in a world where that wasn’t newsworthy, but here we are. When my son was born, I asked the doctor how to properly clean and care for his uncircumcised penis. I look forward to my own exaggerated headline: Mom Of The Year Attends Medical School To Learn How To Clean Son’s Penis.
(Image via Shutterstock)
