Red hair child

[bibbidibobbididoo12]

I have 2 red head girls age 7 and 9.
Both have started to questions about their hair.
Today one of my children asked is having red hair a bad thing.
Obviously I asked her why?
She explained in a book she was reading when they described a character they used all negative words such as 'fat, ugly and had red hair'.

I am constantly telling them how beautiful their hair is and other people regularly tell them.
But both girls have started saying people are just it to make me feel better about our hair colour.
It's a catch 22 situation.
The oldest girl has been bullied and called ginger idiot and you can't play with us because you have ginger hair.

The whole thing just makes me really sad.

I don't know what to say to them?
Do I say in the past people used to think ginger hair/red hair was not as nice etc or not even tell them that? Then they ask Why did they say that?

I experienced I throughout childhood and it was unpleasant.

More recently and acquaintance, who is a mid wife, was laughing about a red haired baby born on her ward. She was saying that mother will need to buy a lot of hats.

I told she was nasty and unprofessional, but she seemed to think she was just witty.

You can’t fox stupid I’m afraid.

My 18 yr old has red hair and has never been bullied. Its really sad when they are.

Plays football and all teammates call out “ginge” on the pitch for the ball and has never been an issue! Its whats were used to as its not said in hate and not upsetting anyone.

One ref heard a teammate call out “ginge” and was yellow carded! Ridiculous!

@mathanxiety hit the nail on the head. STOP banging on to girls especially about how beautiful they are or their red hair is. Stop making everything about looks and appearances. I was utterly gob smacked at the comment about the responses by a class about how to help a bully victim-
“They all decided diet/share/dye etc”
so a victim should diet to avoid being called fat, a rich person should share and a ginger should dye their fucking hair?
No! People should stop bullying. Children should be raised to value WHO people are and how they ACT not what they look like and what they own or have.
FFS what hope have kids got if this is representative of their parents? So much focus on pretty princesses etc and wailing about anti- ginger being like racism (WTF? No it’s really not) 🙄
I gave up after the common sense spoken by the PP mentioned above. I just can’t even RTFT.

My dad had gorgeous auburn hair. It makes me a little sad that my DC didn’t inherit it. This was a brilliant article I remember reading. It is The Times, so needs a subscription to read it, if you have one
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ginger-and-proud-of-it-redheads-challenge-hair-abuse-kx7t0xxvxqt

*A lot of the time for girls the bullying comes down to jealousy and a desire to belittle someone who has something better or more special than you.

I got quite a lot of stick as a kid. It didn’t bother me that much: there were always loads of people saying how much they liked my hair. As a teen and young woman I has real Merida hair and it brought me loads of positive attention. Who would want mousy hair*

Charming. @TinklyLittleLaugh how is this comment any different from the bullying and ridicule of red hair?

I was bullied horrendously at school. Again,as with pp, it became much more sexual in secondary school. I had to get up in front of 500 kids in assembly and a boy shouted "She's got a ginger minge!" The teachers never reprimanded any student who bullied me,not once. It hugely affected my education, I would refuse to go in and left at 15 with no qualifications.

I actively sought out a DH who was much darker so I could be sure my children would not inherit my hair colour. When I gave birth I was actually straining to see what colour their hair was and cried with relief not joy when they both had brown hair and brown eyes. I would love to say that I love my hair now at 39, but the impact on my personality and self confidence is too scarred now.

I have a red hair, but I'm from the US. I used to receive compliments from strangers on a weekly basis, so I think that offset any names I was called in school. To be honest the UK really does view red hair differently though. I've never seen it as vilified as I have here.

Sorry they're going through this, but I promise their feelings will change when they hit 15/16 and realise how unique and beautiful they are!

Red hair is wonderful! I had a really fantastic mix of red hair as a child, I look back at photos now and it was fascinating. Auburn hair with big streaks of strawberry blonde, white blonde and darker brown in there. Everyone complimented me on it and thankfully I never had any issues or bullying.

Frustratingly it didn’t last and as I got older my hair got darker, it’s actually a very ashy mid brown now which is odd as my dad is a red head and my mum a blonde. I choose to have it darkened to a very dark chocolate brown.

I did however keep my red head freckles which I got relentlessly bullied for, I hated them for years and now I love them!

I have red hair and my goodness I wouldn't change it for the world, I adore it. But......I used to get teased as a child (because children can be horrible and idiotic) and it used to really upset me. I never didn't like my hair, and wish it were different, but I was hugely sensitive about it. Because people used to shout out 'Ginge!' and 'ginger' as an insult (and say all sorts of rude things), I was adamant my hair was auburn and not ginger. It infuriates me (still does) that people would be so rude just because of a hair colour and at the time I used to liken it to racism (I can see now that it's not) but when you are on the receiving end of being teased and bullied because of something different about your appearance it's hard. Now I can see it's partly jealousy (because red hair is in my humble opinion the most beautiful) and I revel in the stereotypes about redheads - strong, feisty, brave, kick-ass. I would read stories / watch things with your daughters about all the fantastic red headed heroines and heros (the Weasleys, Pippi Longstocking, Merida, Ariel, Anne of Green Gables (I know she gets a lot of criticism for her hair in the book but she also comes to love it in the end). And when they're (quite a lot!) older maybe they can watch Poldark! (I know Demelza doesn't have red hair in the book but I think she looks fabulous in the TV adaptation). Good luck OP in raising your fantastic redheaded daughters.

Red hair... beautiful, IMO.

So many red heads throughout history... Queen Elizabeth I 😊

It's a thing. DS has dark ginger hair (also brown eyes and a skin which tans so fortunately doesn't have the problems some very fair red heads have with the sun). He was bullied by a couple of kids at school on the basis of hair colour. Fortunately he took robust action shall we say, and sorted them out. He now has a beard to match his hair and looks like an actual Viking and loves his hair.
My Dsis has lighter red hair and suffered terribly at school in the seventies.
I just don't get it.
Even fixated friends of mine throw around casual comments when babies in are born in our group - 'at least he's not a ginger' is what one doctor friend of mine said. You what?!
Yes it's a thing

I really wouldn’t say that ‘in the past it was not as nice etc’ definitely don’t say that. That just created a deeper bedded complex and they’ll think everyone dislikes their hair colour not just the mean kid in question.

Tell them that people get bullied for all sorts of reasons like too fat, too slim, to tall, too short, wears glasses, has braces, big teeth, hair to thick, hair to curly etc...

Tell them models often get called ugly and it’s just cos people are jealous. Tell them other kids are jealous of there beautiful hair!

And for the record I think red/ginger hair is beautiful. My DD wishes she had her brother's colouring. She is boring brown like me!

My little boy has red hair, and reading these comments I'm so nervous for him to go to school. It would break my heart if he got teased 😔

She explained in a book she was reading when they described a character they used all negative words such as 'fat, ugly and had red hair'

This pisses me off big-time - not just the association of red hair with "nastiness", but also that if someone is overweight or plain then they must be horrible.

Not all pretty, slender people are nice and kind. there are some real bastards among them Same with people who don' have red hair.

I live red hair - it is beautiful! I've spent a fortune over the years achieving and maintaining a natural(ish) looking red colour. Your DDs are beyond lucky to be blessed with it.

I hope that their confidence isn't dented by the spite of other kids - unfortunately, some children (and adults) are just bullies. They will find something about anyone if they decide they want to make their lives a misery.

It is sickening.

I'm another who was bullied horrendously for the crime of having red hair as a child. I'm in Scotland so I'm always bemused when I see these threads proclaiming that there is no prejudice against red hair here. Maybe it has got better but I was certainly not the only child to suffer during my childhood.

As a child I was:

Thrown down staircases at school on as least two occasions (I still get panicky when someone walks behind me on a staircase)
Randomly punched in the face by a passing older pupil whom I'd never seen before in my life
Pushed into traffic while standing at a bus stop.
Told by a teacher, to the laughter of classmates, "I can't stand the sight of gingers. You make me sick"
Never, ever asked out by boys - it was made quite clear how my classmates viewed the idea of getting intimate with "a ginger".

Other types of bullying including nobody wanting to sit with me in case they caught "ginger disease" and then, as I got older, references to ginger pubes.

I kept diaries through my teenage years and reading these back now scares me to death; I wrote constantly about how lonely and miserable I was and how I wanted to kill myself but didn’t have the knowledge or means to do it (I shudder to think what I might have done if the internet had been around back then). The most heartbreaking thing was that despite is being the source of my unhappiness, I loved my hair colour - I thought it was vibrant and alive and couldn’t understand why it was a source of amusement or disgust for so many other people.

PP have mentioned how many people love and seek red hair but as a child this wasn't helpful. If I was stopped by a well meaning old lady in the village at lunchtime who wanted to touch my hair and tell me how she always wanted that shade, you could bet that the bullying that afternoon would be worse.

As an adult, I find discriminatory incidents few and far between but then I tend to be blindsided and revert back to being that unconfident, bullied child when they do happen. Once, waiting to go into a nightclub with friends, I was cornered by a group of idiots who told me I was going to get glassed once inside. They were very menacing and I was terrified so jumped in a taxi home to the bemusement of my friends who were convinced they were "all talk". Then, a few years ago, while walking home from work (as a 35 year old women in a business suit), I was followed by a group of teenagers calling me names, wanting to see my "ginger pubes" and telling me they were going to throw me into the river. Almost every pregnant woman I've ever worked with has made a joke about loving it "even if it's ginger".

It's horrible and it’s disgusting that this form of prejudice is still seen as acceptable and part of Britishness. I agree with PPs that overly focusing on beautiful red-headed celebrities can be seen as over-compensating and could do more harm than good. Let's not forget that Nicole Kidman once said in an interview that she wasn't a natural ginger while making ugh noises and claimed to dye her hair a nice share of red. Also I've heard friends kids claim that Brave is the worst Disney film because the princess is a ginger (although I've not heard the same about The Little Mermaid). don't know what the answer is though - maybe focusing on the bullies behaviour and why your girls should feel sorry for them?

OP of course you want to reassure your DDs that their hair is lovely but be careful not to reinforce the importance of looks too much. This is an opportunity to have a wider discussion here about why it is wrong to judge others on how they look and how to notice that behaviour and challenge/avoid it. This is a good age for your girls to learn that what they look like is the least important thing about them!

I had really bright red hair growing up, you certainly wouldn’t miss me in a crowd. As I’ve got older it’s gone darker.

I did suffer name calling in school, it was horrible at the time! Now at the age of 29 I love my natural hair and haven’t dyed it in years. I always get comments on it when I’m out and about.

Tell your daughter be proud. She’s unique!

Oh OP how sad. I've got red hair and have a red haired toddler and hoped that this had died out from when I was at school. I got bullied terribly. I really wish I could offer advice but it sounds as if you are already doing all the right things for your lovely DC.

Do your girls like superheroes? An awful lot of the best female superheroes have beautiful red hair. Red was often the most vibrant colour in comic books so artists tended to choose red hair for female characters far more than you see in normal life. As a result there are a huge number of iconic female superheroes (and some of the best villains/antiheroes) with amazing red hair. Jean Grey, Batgirl, Batwoman, Black Widow, Medusa (who's hair is her superpower). There are so many of them. I always wanted to have red hair because all of my favourite characters were red heads.

Somehow I don’t think we’re going to get the title of the book where a character is described as “fat, ugly and had red hair”.

Penguins - your post broke my heart. I can't help aching fr the little girl you once were - it's so horrible that there are some people who just get pleasure from making someone else's life a misery.

Twats.

Red hair is beautiful and relatively rare, though I gather there is more of it in theBritish Isles than anywhere else in the world.

In Medieval and Tudor times red hair was highly prized. Lots of princesses were described as having red hair. The probability that they were all red or gold-red haired is unlikely. It is far more likely that they had hair colours that still predominate in Europe - various shades of light brown hair that had been blonde or a little red when they were very little children. When writing about these women it was important to describe them as unusually beautiful. Describing them as having light brown hair really would not have achieved that.

I agree with don't go on about it. It's nice to compliment people on their best features, but you don't need to read special books or point out red haired characters in a heavy-handed way.

Your dd will naturally see plenty of people with red hair who are interesting/successful/stand out in films, adverts, in real life.

Just treat this as a bullying issue as that's what it is. Children bully others, call out names to those with red hair but also with glasses, over sexuality over all types of things. Men shout out of cars at women who are large, going jogging, red hair because they are utter twats- and this culture of insulting women in the street/calling out is something that does not occur elsewhere as much as in parts of the UK.

It is an absolute bullying issue so you should take it up with the school, and talk to your kids about being firm against bullies (e.g. using books like Queen Bees and Wanabees).

Don't assume either, that things are going to be awful. I used to be teased a bit at school, but everyone was teased about something. I had the odd weird comment, but mostly the reaction to my hair has been positive. Now I am not dyeing it, I'm nearly 50 and it's ace!

My sister got teased something chronic at school for having red hair.
She was a proper ginger and it was really curly as well.
She got loads of TV and theatre work and as she got older it was her crowning glory.
Unfortunately though, when younger they won't appreciate it and they will be teased about it.
It's totally crap but there's not much you can do about it other than positivity every single day!