You read correctly.
I have recently become reacquainted with this ancient and powerful non-verbal communication, this behavioral
pheromone, through one of the most clichéd, predictable and nevertheless unsettling circumstances that we men who are now
parents must own as much as we own the fact that the sun rises.
My daughter, my sweet, innocent latency age child, performed a Hair Flip with less effort than I expend when bending over to tie my shoes.
I remember Hair Flips as seminal events. I remember looking forward to Hair Flips in movies and television shows, and, most importantly, as signs that a date or a conversation was going well. None of this is at all the same as seeing your own daughter so effortlessly enact this potent social cue.
Freud felt that school-aged children were latent in their sexual desires -- hence the term "latency" among psychoanalytically oriented developmentalists of the previous century. He conceptualized the latency ages as devoid of sexual conflict, children oblivious to the subtleties of sexual codes. Although oversimplified, most would argue that Freud felt that latency was characterized by non-libidinal behavior, all actions co-opted by the child's desire to master the world in an asexual manner.
I wonder if Sigmund ever watched his daughter do a Hair Flip. To put it another way, if my latency-aged daughter can do a Hair Flip, then I'd hate to see (but suspect I will anyhow) what non-latent behavior will look like. O, the joys of having been a boy and now trying to be a dad....
I think that at this point the context of my daughter's Hair Flip would be useful to describe:
It's an unseasonably warm December night in the Boston suburbs. The town center where I live is packed with revelers. It is Christmas tree lighting night in my little town, an evening more social than religious, children running to the Indian restaurant for their free samosas, and then to the Starbucks booth with its hot chocolate and balloons. A 21rst century Norman Rockwell painting is being created. There is truly peace on our street and good will towards men and women.
I sit with my wife and youngest child in the frozen yogurt place, enjoying wholesome peppermint yogurt on this warm winter night.
Spooning some yogurt into my mouth I look around. "Where'd she go," I ask my wife, as we both notice that our older daughter is no longer at the table. The freedom and safety of the evening has piqued her independence, and throughout the last couple of hours she's been disappearing and reappearing like the Cheshire Cat.
My wife shrugs and I get up to look around. She's not in the store, so I step outside and find her chatting with a great kid whom she's known since kindergarten. He's leaning against the wall of the jewelry store, almost James Dean-like except without a trace of nihilism, and she's giggling. I beckon for my wife to come watch with me. It's odd, seeing your daughter, whom you know so well, turn into something you had long forgotten but cannot help but to recognize. My wife comes out with my youngest daughter and smiles. We stand and watch, the crescent moon glowing low in the winter sky.
"Did she just do a Hair Flip?" my wife asks, smiling, wide eyed, as if our child has said a new word or taken her first steps.
I replay what I've just seen, watching it again in the slow motion of my mind's eye. Her friend says something, my daughter smiles, and effortlessly, gracefully, like a dancer, she tilts her little head down and throws it back, her long chestnut hair sweeping forward and then back again along her shoulder blades. Her friend, just for an instant, loses his balance, stumbles a bit towards the wall against which he had a second before been so confidently leaning. It's like there was a small earthquake, a tremor, but he regains his composure quickly and is back to his confident poise in almost no time. I could have missed the whole thing if I had blinked, if I had hiccupped.
I nod affirmatively to my wife and agree: "Yeah. That was a Hair Flip...I'm going in." At this point I sense the possibility of a badly misguided move on my part, a sort of declaration of war in the absence of legitimate provocation. It is biological, as biological as the Hair Flip is for my daughter, that I both endure and fight the urge to intervene.
"Don't you dare," warns my level-headed wife, reminding me yet again of all the reasons that I married her. We men often descend into buffoonery without the guidance of our wiser partners.
This was the context of the Hair Flip, a tectonic event that I suspect will signal further earth shattering moments in my journey through parenthood. But, as a psychiatrist, many things need to be dealt with here, and I guess that if I can't (and really don't want) to stop the inevitable journey of my children towards self realization, then I can at least intellectualize my understanding of the event from whatever unique perspective I bring to the table.
So, we've already dealt with Freud. Latency my tush! Hell, my legs felt a bit rubbery. My daughter knew, at some very deep-rooted biological and simultaneously unconscious level, exactly what she was doing. I don't think we can call the Hair Flip an archetype, certainly not in the Jungian sense. I'd guess that every culture and even regions within a given culture have their own version of what an anthropologist might call the Great Western Hair Flip. When Desmond Morris wrote The Naked Ape in 1967, he argued that humans learn to flirt early and practice their flirting often as a function of adaptive evolutionary pressures. In this sense, flirtation, of which the Hair Flip is a specific enactment, helps humans to occupy a biological niche that I think and really, really hope has as much to do with romance as it does with reproduction. The girls flip their hair because their culture has sanctioned this behavior as an acceptable, non-dangerous form of meta-communication with romantic and deeply buried (what Freud might call latent?) sexual overtones. I have been on the receiving end of a Hair Flip, and it is for all intents and purposes a true pheromone, a not-too-provocative invitation to continue the interaction, a sign that things are going well.
And that, as a psychiatrist and as a father, I must acknowledge is a good thing. Kids progress along very steep developmental trajectories. The differences between a 6 year old and a 9 year old are profound. We know this from neuroimaging, from molecular studies, but, more sensibly, from just looking around. That my daughter can do a Hair Flip is wicked cool, as a good New Englander might remark. Her rapidly developing brain gleaned a social and evolutionarily adaptive communicative cue from the prevailing culture and called upon it at the appropriate time. THIS IS NORMAL! Any discomfort I experience is about my own coming to terms with my daughter's capacity to beguile. And for this, I know a lot of good shrinks I can talk to.
