How I maintain my 3 year old’s natural hair

More often than not, I get asked how I maintain my daughter’s hair! Half the time i’m not quite sure how to answer this question without sounding a little confusing. So I’ve spent some time over the weekend to come up with a much easier way to explain how I do it.

My daughter has got natural hair – 4c type. She’s always had natural hair and I hope she’ll want to keep it natural forever. In her tiny 3 years of life, she’s had a full hair cut (all the hair gone) once, and quite a number of hair trims. To be honest, taking care of her hair is almost as difficult as caring for a newborn baby. But it gets easier with routine!

Sadly I didn’t figure this out until about a year ago but once I did; well, let’s just say it’s gotten a whole lot EASIER!

Here’s I what I do.

• Wash her hair at most 3 times a month
  • depending on the products I used on her hair during the week and the build up thereof, I try not to wash her hair too many times on the count of I don’t want the shampoo to strip her hair too much.
• Avoid hairstyle that pull on her edges/hair
  • Naturally we barely have any edges so it’s really important to me to make sure that the hairstyles I do on my daughter’s hair are very gentle. This also helps quite a lot with reducing  hair breakage.
• Use sulphate free products
  • Truth be told, I haven’t done much research on what exactly sulphate is and it’s damages thereof but I choose to use these products because sulphate is said to actually increase the level of sensitivity on ones skin (provided you have sensitive skin) and cause irritation. My daughter is 3 years old, her scalp is very fragile (1 tight pull and there’ll be pimple everywhere) and this is why I choose sulphate free products. I’ve also heard that these are good for natural hair so I guess that’s a win-win :).
• Trim her ends every 2nd month
  • It took me quite a while to get myself to do this. I didn’t want to cut her hair, even if it meant just her ends. She didn’t want me to either! But as you can imagine, the ends started to get a bit crazy after a while and they were a bit of a tangled mess. Now I have gotten myself and her into the routine of trimming her hair every 2nd month and it’s been amazing. I must say, it still breaks my heart to do it but it’s totally worth it. It helps me deal with tangling in her hair and keeps her ends in check like magic.
• Moisturize her hair every 2nd or 3rd day (depending on the season)
  • I cannot even begin to tell you just how important this is. You know how they say you must keep hydrated to keep your skin looking great; well, apparently the same applies for hair. My daughter – like me – has coarse 4c hair and if not moisturized, it’ll be a nightmare to deal with. Depending on the season, I try by all means to moisturize her hair as often as I possibly can. In winter, it’s every third day – for some reason her hair is happier in winter – then all other seasons it’s every 2nd day. This is not cast in stone, I normally feel/touch her hair first before moisturizing to determine if it needs to be moisturized again before actually doing it. I am always very careful not to wear her hair down with too much moisture.

The ultimate goal for me is to keep her hair healthy, strong, neat, and beautiful all the time – at the very least I try to. I also try not to pay much attention to the length but I’ve noticed that the more I pay attention to these 4 things, the more the length just keeps growing. I am no expert at growing hair but this is how I’ve been able to maintain mine and my daughter’s hair the past year. It’s been working great and unless something changes, I intend to keep it this way for a while.

How do you maintain your hair/your daughter’s hair?

xoxo

Oluv