LW needs practical hair-care advice....

[conuly]

Dear Care and Feeding,

I am a mom to a beautiful and wonderful 5-year-old son. He has shoulder-length hair that he loves … except he refuses to take care of it. We brush it every night before bed and again in the morning. He HATES having his hair brushed so the whole endeavor falls apart every time before we can finish. This means he’s got horrible knots that even with a detangler and a special brush for difficult hair can’t get out. We tell him if he wants long hair, we have to take care of it. We’ve tried giving him ownership of it (he won’t brush it if we don’t do it), picking his detangler, you name it, we’ve tried.

I don’t want to cut his hair without his say-so, but taking care of it is a massive fight we go through twice a day and both my husband and I are at our wits’ end. I have waist-length hair that he watches me take care of daily so he understands what it takes, but he’s also 5 and we get that he needs help. But he’s also starting to look like Bam Bam from the ‘90s Flintstones movie. Help!

—Hairy Situation

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(no subject)

[conuly]

Dear Prudence,

My husband and I have worked ourselves to the bone to provide the best start for our three kids. I only make around 40k a year and the majority has gone towards paying for our kids to go to college without loans. My husband and I were very blunt that we expected our kids to keep their grades up and graduate in four years. Our kids are all roughly four years apart. There is no way we could pay for more than one a year.

We also told them not to expect us to fund their lifestyles. They could always come live at home, but they would need to work and save money. We weren’t going get into the Peter Pan trap of many of our peers. My own mother worked herself into an early grave because my brothers never grew up beyond hitting on younger girls and spending all their money on weed.

Our daughter, “Darla,” has always been difficult. We fought a lot over her refusal to consider summer classes because she wanted to socialize instead. She skated through school and changed her degree twice. That meant she was only half done with her degree by the time her younger brother started college. It was a huge blow out when we told her she to get a job and loans. She has moved in and out of our house several times because she found the house rules not to her liking. Darla was of the mind that she could come and go as she pleased, take the car without asking, and have her boyfriends sleep over, and quit her job if she didn’t get the shift she wanted.

It has been exhausting. When Darla met “Brandon,” she seemed to finally calm down and grow up. They share an apartment and both of them work. Darla has talked about finishing her degree and even grad school. Then they announced their engagement. We were happy but told our daughter that we wouldn’t be able to contribute much to the wedding. We needed to save for retirement, and our youngest was in his final year of college. (He took a two year hiatus after being in a car wreck that killed his girlfriend and two others. A drunk driver plowed right into them.) How our daughter responded was disgraceful. Darla screamed about how we always favored her brothers and we were obligated to pay for the wedding by tradition. My husband told Darla the marriage license was $50 and he would cover it if they wanted to get married next week, and that it sounded more like she wanted to play princess for a day than actually be a wife.

Darla responded by attacking her brother and daring to blame him for the deaths. I think my son would have decked his sister if we weren’t in the room. Since then our family is fractured. Neither of our sons will talk to their sister and have spoken about boycotting the wedding. Darla only calls us when she wants to relitigate the fight. I love our daughter, but we didn’t raise her with this sense of entitlement. I married her father in a borrowed dress at the local church. Our first dance was to a cassette tape. So what do we do here?

—About Darla

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