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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/HeatherMKoehler on 2023-09-06 06:29:19.

My 13 year old son, Theo, is best friends with a girl in his class who was diagnosed with brain cancer in November. She’s undergoing chemo and ended up losing her hair, which was obviously really hard on her. His peers are starting to get to that age where they’re absorbed with appearances, and have decided that everyone needs to fit into a norm. A few people made some less than kind comments about her and how she looks without hair. Theo came home last week and told me he wanted to shave his head. I made him think it over a bit to make sure it’s what he wanted because he’d been pretty attached to over the past several months and had been growing it out. He was adamant that he was certain it was what he wanted, and my husband shaved his head for him last night. That was possibly the happiest I’ve ever seen him. I asked him if he would miss his hair, and he told me (still grinning ear to ear) that he didn’t care what his hair looked like, it would grow back and it made his friend happy. He facetimed his friend afterwards to show her and it was just incredibly sweet. Today I got a call from his teacher that a couple of students had been pestering Theo about his hair, even after he explained that he did it for his friend. She tried to claim that Theo’s hair was distracting the other students, and that she was giving him permission to wear hats to school (usually against dress code), to ‘reinstate the order that he’d disrupted’. I told her that he would not be wearing a hat, and diminishing the entire sentiment behind him shaving his head, just because his classmates are being bullies, and told her she was being insensitive to not just Theo, but to his friend (who really is the only one who matters at the moment). My husband told me that the way I reacted, while justified, was rude and may have repercussions for Theo.