My wife and I have three daughters. Our oldest is 16, our middle is 14, and our youngest is 10. Everyone on both sides of the family has brown hair, brown eyes, and straight hair. Our oldest and youngest daughters fit that pattern, but our middle daughter has curly blonde hair and green eyes.
I’ll be honest, I’ve struggled to bond with her because I had doubts about whether she was biologically mine. Those doubts made it hard for me to connect with her over the years.
Recently, she asked for shampoo and conditioner made for curly hair. She found products that weren’t very expensive, so I bought them for her. After a little over a month, she said she needed more conditioner. I thought she was using too much because it seemed like she was going through it very quickly. She insisted that curly hair requires a lot more conditioner than straight hair.
I bought another bottle but told her it needed to last at least two months. When she ran out again after about a month, I replaced it with dollar store shampoo and conditioner. She got extremely upset and said it would ruin the progress she had made with her hair. She also said that her hair had been difficult to manage for years because we never learned how to care for curly hair properly.
She even threatened to shave her head. Now she’s refusing to speak to me and is being disrespectful toward both me and my wife. My wife thinks we should buy the products she wants, but I think she needs to learn a lesson.
There are two separate issues here, and I think you’re mixing them together.
The first issue is the hair.
Your daughter is probably right.
Curly hair is not cared for the same way as straight hair. People with curly hair often use much more conditioner, use different products entirely, and can have major problems with frizz, dryness, and breakage when using products that work fine for straight hair. The fact that nobody else in your family has curly hair doesn’t make her experience less real.
The second issue is much bigger than the hair.
You openly admit you’ve had trouble bonding with her because you doubted she was yours. Reading between the lines, I suspect your daughter knows that. Even if nobody ever said it out loud, she has likely spent years feeling different from her sisters and wondering why.
So from her perspective, this probably isn’t about conditioner. It’s about feeling misunderstood and dismissed by her father.
The disrespect needs to be addressed. A fourteen year old doesn’t get a free pass to be rude. But consequences work best when they’re tied to the behavior, not when they’re disguised as proving a point.
Right now, it sounds less like she’s learning a lesson and more like she’s feeling dismissed.
I would focus far more on repairing the relationship than on a bottle of conditioner.