I often loose patience and am anxious about accidentally cutting skin when I try to cut my 18 month old's hair. Please suggest approaches that you've used that work to get the hair cut safely with the least frustration for parent or child.
What we have tried: using comb and scissors in the high chair (little success) and in the shower (some success). Thanks for your time and consideration.
You didn't specifically say you want to do it yourself, so:
Obviously a professional hairdresser does a great job with much less risk of injuries, and much quicker. And you don't have to clean up afterward! :-)
Our local hairdresser (part of a nationwide drugstore chain) does toddler haircuts for free. The whole operation from entering the store until leaving takes less than 15 minutes and goes very smoothly. Ask your local shop what their rates are for a toddler, you might be pleasantly surprised.
I think our best improvement in the process is to have both parents involved. Our son usually sits on mom's lap while I do the cutting. This keeps him engaging with mom and he hardly notices the scissors. This doesn't always work, in fact sometimes it's a total bust... thankfully unless you're totally changing the hair style, most folks don't really notice that a kids hair is lopsided... so you can stop when they're not into it and come back at it tomorrow. We've had to do that a few times; I'll get one side done but not the back or the other side then he has had enough and we call it quits. The next day I'll get the other side and the back. So for a day his hair looks a little "off"... oh well.
I'll also admit that it's FAR simpler, and gets a MUCH better result to occasionally just pay the money to let an expert do it... we have a place in town that specializes in little kids hair cuts.
This is one area where I call in a professional. Because they work with shears all day and are used to making quick, sure cuts without stabbing anyone, they're going to be better at it than I am. For my toddler, it's a 3-person process: hairdresser, my mom, and me. The latter two hold/distract her. She still screams like a banshee, but it's enough where my lightning-fast hairdresser can just get in there, snip snip, and it's done. It's a lot less drawn-out and drama-ridden when the process takes only 5 minutes.
Since we use clippers for both my husband and my son's hair I find it's helpful to have Matthias help with cutting his father's hair first, and then vice versa. He sees how it's done and can see that it doesn't hurt Dad (even if it is a bit loud), so he doesn't freak out (much) when it's his turn.
On a side note: Be sure he hasn't changed the settings on the clippers before letting him go gung-ho on your hair. My husband looked ready for enlistment the last time we cut his hair!
We struggled through a good half dozen haircuts with our son on our own. We always had to stop early* when he cried too much for us to bear.
His most recent haircut (21 months) was by far the best yet. We actually used a Flowbee (yes, the as seen on tv product from the '90s!) He sat in front of the tv, we cut his hair with the Flowbee, and the vacuum took care of the trimmings.
For those unfamiliar, it's a shaver attachment that connects to a vacuum cleaner. It has various tubes that keeps the cutting blades a certain distance away from the scalp. The vacuum sucks the hair straight and into the blade, gobbling up all the cut hair as well.
Finally no more cries of "eyes itchy!"
The Flowbee is more expensive than we expected. It was about $130 on Amazon. But I'll probably get my own haircuts with it too, so it'll save money in the long run. And hundreds of reviews gave it 4.5 stars!
The biggest complaint we have is how loud the bugger is. We had to do a lot of coaxing to ease him into the thing. Letting him flip the switch to turn it on helped. We also never got too close to the ears, due to the volume. But it's definitely a lot louder than we anticipated.
Edit: having given him his second haircut with it, we tried a few solutions to the noise:
* I had to try really hard not to use the pun "cut it short" here
My wife has done it while our youngest is asleep, she can get the sides easily enough using a comb and scissors and just does the back really quickly while he is awake and distracted. We tried clippers but he didn't like the sound of the clippers near his head. Sometimes while in the bath it works, since the baby is sitting in the tub and very distracted, just need to make sure you use blunt scissors to avoid accidents.
I use the clippers (buy a fairly good set - like Wahl - as dull clippers hurt!) and have since my kids were ~12 months (both boys). It's pretty easy to do, and pretty quick, and it looks decent as long as you pay some attention to leaving some parts shorter/longer appropriately (I follow the directions that came with the clippers). They sit quietly for me more so than for a professional (as I found out the one time I used one).
To keep the kids happy, I give them something like a cheese stick or a piece of fruit to hold and eat while I am doing it, and I let them play with the clippers (they're fairly safe if you are right there - just keep the guards on). Both of them had also played with my (electric) facial razor before, so that helped them be familiar with the noise and vibrations.
Thank goodness it grows or my kids would be living a life of embarrassment. Here's what we tried:
One of my son's has hair that prefers to be in tangles. He likes it long but refuses to take care of it. So, now that they are older, I give them (slightly less than) the money that would have been paid to have their hair cut when they let me cut it at home. This has ended the fighting about whether or not the hair gets cut: win win!
I always sucked it up and paid for the expensive child salon with my first child, but when two and three came along there was no way I was dropping $65 every six weeks for crappy haircuts.
I am by no means a barber, but I manage to give my boys reasonably decent looking cuts. It's nothing fancy, but it's off their ears, and out of their eyes. My kids are 3 1/2 and 2, and have been cutting their hair since they were about 16 months old. I have learned to cut a moving target. I minimize the movement by confining both of us in the tub, with the doors shut. The boy sits on a step stool and holds my iPhone to watch a video. In order to avoid injury, I sharpened a pair of children's scissors-the kind with the rounded tip- so that nobody gets poked. I focus on the most important areas (bangs, sideburns, over the ears, and the back) first, that way if worse comes to worse and the boy won't sit, we can go a few more weeks and try again. Clean up is easy in the tub. I use a vacuum to suck up most of the hairs, then I remove the stool and phone, and turn on the shower to rinse the hairs off the boy and the tub. All done!
My kids hair is too coarse for the clippers, and all three of them are terrified of it.
We did it this way:
once done with bath/shower, we used to put her sitting on the washing machine (where we usually change her). One of us would talk to her, non-stop, and the other one would go about the business of cutting her hair telling her to be still: she was 16 to 24 months old at the time. We used to use very small and non-pointy scissors, to reduce risks.
This has produced some very funny looks, but also great results and she used to be (still is) quite proud of her dad being her hairdresser.
Lately we just ask her (she's 3) if she wants her hair trimmed and if "yes" I do that, quickly.
Some times we found the need to have another bath or simply a quick shower to remove hair (usually short) that we didn't catch when cutting. Not to say: wasn't funny for us, but surely two baths for our daughter (albeit the second being very quick) was cause of great joy.
