I let my nine-year-old son dye his hair blue- What was I thinking?

Not much honestly.

Its only hair.

The boy was excited about the idea of making his hair look funky. He has always been a flamboyant kid.

I said I’d buy him the dye.

The decision was informed by what academics might call tacit knowledge. It came from a set of ideas and philosophies and social norms that I have developed and internalized over my lifetime of being a child, working with children and being a parent.

Sometimes it’s worth trying to dig down into your decision making processes to see whether you’re going in the wrong direction and that’s what I’ve done here. I’ve looked into it because of the amount of horror I’ve seen similar decisions provoke on mumsnet and because my son’s school are not happy with his new exciting hairstyle.

My starting point is that I see my children not as extensions of my body or as people that I own, but as individuals in their own right whom I love and take care of. That’s my ‘who my children are’ philosophy.

One of the things that I want my children to know is that they have the last say on things that happen to their bodies. Their bodies are not owned by me, or by any other grown up or person. I consider this important from a child protection point of view. I don’t make them kiss or hug visitors out of politeness for example, because of the message that this sends.

There are times when caring for a child and respecting their autonomy over their body can be in conflict. For example, with the toddler who refuses to eat anything other than toast and fruit. My approach here was to provide a balanced set of foods and encourage them to eat a bite of each, but at the end of the day if they don’t eat it they don’t eat it. There are also areas, where I would like more control over what my children do with their bodies. For example, I would like to stop my children being given (and eating) around 30 packets of sweets a year at school. I’d like to do that because I want to protect my children’s teeth and stop them from developing the kind of raging sugar habit that I have. In practise, I would never approach their school about this; the children like sweets and the people giving them out are doing so out of generosity and kindness.

So, on to hair and dying hair. I think of my children’s hair as being a part of their body and therefore under their jurisdiction.

Dying hair does not in any way harm the person whose hair is dyed unless they have an allergic reaction so there is no ‘caring for the child’ conflict there. Having your hair dyed can be boring, but it doesn’t hurt. It is not equivalent to getting a piercing.

Hair grows. Having your hair dyed is never permanent. It is not equivalent to having a tattoo. Therefore, I reject the ‘they will regret it in the future’ argument.

Having blue hair, or in this case a lock of blue hair in your fringe is not a natural look. That does not bother me in the slightest.

There are many natural things that are good (trees, peacocks), but there are also many that are bad (rape, smelly armpits). There are many unnatural things that are bad (plastic in the sea, diesel fumes), but there are also many unnatural things that are good (central heating, modern medicine).For me unnatural is not a pejorative. It’s use as an argument against something is weak and often repressive. It used to be a major argument against gay sex, for example.

The final argument is not about looking after children, but about rules, social norms and conformity.

I did my due diligence and looked at the school policies before allowing him to dye his hair. I read both the behaviour policy and the uniform policy. Neither mentioned hair. My son also pointed out to me that the school uniform is blue so his hair would fit in with it.

Obviously, the head teacher now wants my son to dye his hair back to brown. He sees my child’s hair as part of his school uniform and conforms to a set of conservative social norms which value natural hair colour.

And to make my decision about how to deal with this I go back to my original thought.

Its only hair.

You’ve got to pick your battles, and in an underfunded, over tested education system, hair is not going to be my battle.