This Mom Waxes Her 3-Year-Old's Unibrow And The Internet Is Divided
She says that she is saving her daughter from future bullies.
When should a parent teach their daughter how to shave her legs? When should they get a manicure for the first time? What age is appropriate for a kid to wear makeup? Are any of these questions even relevant anymore when we should be teaching kids (and mainly young girls) never to abide by societal pressure to groom their bodies and hair a certain way?
For some parents, yes — looking a certain way is still important. But for one Texas mom, it might not be for why you’d think.
Leah Garcia is under fire on TikTok after sharing a video which shows her waxing her young daughter’s unibrow. She explains that she’s not doing it for vanity purposes, but rather to protect her daughter, Bliss, from others who are going to likely tease her for it. She also notes that she had a unibrow as a child that her parents did not wax and she wishes they had.
More: A Mom Shaves Her Baby’s Unibrow — But Her Partner Isn’t Having It
“I don’t care! I don’t care!” Leah Garcia captioned the video. “I’d rather y’all call me a bad mom before I let my 3 year old walk around with a unibrow like my parents did!”
After taking off the wax strip, her daughter exclaims, “Ow, mom, that hurt me!”
Garcia replies, “All right, girl, now you got two eyebrows!”
The viral video, which now has 22.8 million views and 3 million likes, has almost 35,000 people voicing their opinions in the comment section.
Many TikTok users stood on the side of Garcia, noting that they wished their parents had helped them with physical insecurities when they were younger. One user wrote, “Girl! Your saving her from years of trauma and teasing.”
Another said, “My mom wouldn't let me shave [in] 7th grade and I would get bullied for it ... great job mom ... ”
However, not everyone was praising the mom for being proactive with her daughter’s confidence and claimed this grooming routine would do quite the opposite.
“As soon as a parent points out a flaw it will stick with them forever,” one user wrote.
Another echoed, “Once my kids ask I will 100% let them but before then I don’t want to make them insecure on something they haven’t noticed.”
The negative comments led to Garcia making a follow up video, defending herself for waxing her three-year-old’s unibrow. In one response video, she addresses a comment that states, “Conforming to beauty standards teaches them to care what others think.”
Garcia replied with a video of her daughter saying that she is beautiful with or without her unibrow.
Nonetheless, as the video continued to make its way around TikTok, Garcia found herself making another response video to negative comments, stating that what she is doing is just perpetuating societal beauty standards and “giving in” to the bullies.
Even still, she stands by her decision to wax her daughter’s unibrow, stating that this will help her way more than it could ever hurt her. Garcia told TODAY Parents that despite all the internet hate, she is just trying to do right by her kids.
“As a child, I had very thick and dark eyebrows and I’d shave behind my parents’ back because my father didn’t believe children should worry about things like that,” she said. “I remember a boy saying to me in kindergarten, ‘Why are your eyebrows so big?’”
She also wanted to make it clear that Bliss gives her permission for her mom to do this. “We have ‘waxing days’ at home,” she explained. “I ask, ‘Who wants to wax?’ No one is holding down Bliss — she’s not screaming in pain. It’s her choice.”
The internet might have a lot of opinions on how this mom should raise her kid, but at the end of the day, she is going to do what she wants to do. And it should end there.
