My Son’s Hair Colour – An Adopted Child’s Identity in the Family

Our family is what one may call multicultural, my wife (SO) is ethnically Chinese, our son is Javanese, and I’m a plain old regular white guy. On a day to day basis these labels are irrelevant to us, we are a family and that’s all that really matters.

Occasionally though something comes up to remind us that we are, in some ways different to each other.

One such occasion came up a few months ago when SO was dying her hair. Being Chinese her hair is, of course, black, but she’s starting to get a few grey (white?) hairs coming through. As such she’s taken to dying her hair every few months.

For anyone interested, she uses a dark brown colour, although it still looks all black to me. And don’t ask me what colour it’s label calls it, I’m a guy remember. It’s just dark brown to me.

Anyway, on this day as she was dying her hair, our son, Jay, asked if he could dye his hair brown. SO said no as he was to young, but maybe when he’s older (like 21) she would let him. No more was said about it and she thought nothing more of it, and didn’t enlighten me as to the contents of the conversation.

Fast forward a few days and Jay decided to ask a follow up question to his dyed hair request. In his most innocent manner (I’m not sure if he really qualifies as innocent at this stage) he asked if Daddy (that’s me if you’ve lost track) could dye his hair black.

It turns out his wanting to dye his hair was not to do the same thing as his mother, but rather he wanted to look like Me and he thought that if he dyed his hair the same colour as me he would look more like me. And failing that he wanted me to look more like him, with both of us having black hair.

This is the time we sat down and talked about it as a family and told him that it didn’t matter to us that we might look a bit different, it’s our love for each other that makes us a family.

I truly believe that I could never love a biological son more than I love Jay, it doesn’t matter if we look the same. We’re a multicultural family and I’m proud of that, and would want it no other way.