The cuts · $22 · under 12

The son sits first.

That is not a charming detail, it is the method. A child who has watched his father get a haircut in the same chair five minutes earlier is a child who will sit still, and a child who goes second has spent five minutes getting frightened.

Heritage & Sons / The kid’s chair

How to do it Come Tuesday
or Wednesday
morning

Quiet shop
no queue
no audience

Bring nothing
we have the
toy chest

Sit in the chair
yourself first

The first one

A first haircut goes well or badly on the twenty minutes before it, not during it. Four things decide it and none of them are about hair.

Come when it is quiet. Tuesday or Wednesday morning. An empty shop with one barber and no queue is a completely different room from a Saturday at eleven with six men waiting, and a two-year-old can tell the difference immediately.

Do not warn him for a week. A child told on Monday that Saturday is haircut day has five days to build it into something. Tell him that morning, casually, and make it an errand rather than an event.

Sit in the chair first, yourself. This is the father-and-son cut and it is why the price is what it is. He watches you have it done, in the same chair, by the same man, and it stops being a strange machine near his head.

Let him keep his own hands busy. The toy chest is by the window and everything in it is allowed in the chair.

What we will not do

Hold a crying child down to finish a haircut. If it is not going to happen today, it is not going to happen today, and we would rather he comes back in a fortnight and enjoys it than we get a tidy result and lose him for ten years.

There is no charge for an attempt that does not finish. That has happened perhaps twice a year for thirty years and every one of them came back.

The two tickets.

The lollipop, and why it is at the end

Every barber shop with a jar knows what it is for. Given first, it is a bribe and it buys about four minutes. Given at the end, it is the last thing that happens, and the last thing that happens is what a small child remembers about the whole twenty minutes.

The same logic is why the toy chest is by the window rather than at the chair, and why nobody in this shop says “it will not hurt” to a child, since that sentence introduces the possibility that it might.

Boys who have had a bad one somewhere else

Come on a Tuesday morning and tell us at the door. We will do it in stages: sit in the chair, cape on, clippers switched on across the room, and stop wherever he stops. Sometimes that is a haircut and sometimes it is a visit where nothing gets cut, and both are a good outcome.

Joe has been doing this since 1994. His father did it before him and there is a photograph on the wall of a boy in 1961 who is now in his seventies and still comes in.

Asked often.

When should a child get their first haircut?

When the hair is in his eyes, which is usually somewhere between one and two. There is no developmental reason to wait and no reason to rush.

How do I make a first haircut go well?

Come on a quiet weekday morning, tell him that morning rather than a week ahead, and sit in the chair yourself first. Those three do more than anything that happens during the cut.

What if my child will not sit still?

Then we stop, and there is no charge. Holding a frightened child down to finish a haircut buys a tidy result today and costs you the next ten years of them.

How much is a kid’s haircut?

Twenty-two dollars under twelve, or fifty-eight for a father and son together, which is the one we would recommend for a first haircut.

Tuesday morning.

Quiet shop, no queue, no audience. It is the single best thing you can do for a first haircut and it costs nothing.

Hours and the block When it is quiet