Story time (a real story, it happened in Brazil):
I'll tell you what happened without opinion, then test you. One question only.
A young girl was going through a tough time, fighting against cancer, and she had to go through chemotherapy. This treatment, as it often does, caused her to lose her hair. So, she decided to shave her head, and with a lot of courage, she went to school bald.
A group of bullies targeted her, and she became so overwhelmed that she went home and tried to end her own life. Thankfully, her mother walked in mid-act, just in time to stop her.
The parents escalated this serious case to the school board, and the bullies' parents were called to take responsibility.
One mother became so angry at her daughter’s attitude that she decided to shave her daughter’s head as punishment. She described the situation as "I wanted her to know what it feels like to be bald."
She shared some details: her daughter ran and screamed, but she kept going. She finished by saying it was a tough decision, but it had to be done.
That's the raw story. Facts only.
Now to the test: Did this mother do well?
A. Correct reaction. Bitches gotta learn.
B. Utterly wrong.
One secret about this test: it isn't really measuring your cognitive intelligence but rather how much discomfort you can tolerate before you flinch.
Because A is the flinch. A is the answer you grab when the real picture, a bald, humiliated kid and a sick girl who nearly died, is too heavy to hold, so you trade it for something that feels like justice.
I usually live on the "it's all relative" team. I love holding two things at once and refusing to land. Not today. Today there's only one correct answer, and it's B. And I already know most of you failed, because the discomfort is real and the exit is right there.
About 95% of the comments I read on social media reached for the exit. In Brazil, this woman was basically hailed as the ultimate mom, you know, like the Mother of the Year or something.
First, the soothing part, for the eye-for-an-eye crowd
I’m very aware that A feels good because it taps into the “eye for an eye” fallacy, which is deeply satisfying and feels a lot like justice.
However, it's merely revenge disguised as justice, and the reason we often confuse the two is that revenge provides a sense of closure, which is what the discomfort desperately seeks.
Before I dive into the details, I want to make a point: if the headline had read "cancer girl gets revenge on her bully," I wouldn't bother writing about it at all. I'd just shrug it off and move on. You see, when someone takes revenge on their tormentor, it's a pretty straightforward story: someone gets wronged, they fight back, and that's the end of it. Action, reaction, bye.
(I'm not endorsing revenge, okay? I'm not saying it's acceptable or that it should be done. I'm just saying I wouldn't feel motivated to write about it.)
So why can't I let this one close?
Because the mother is the caregiver. She's the gatekeeper of morality, of obedience, of what gets taught in that house. You can understand why a wronged person might want revenge, but a caregiver must not act on that impulse.
That doesn't mean the daughter gets off; she deserves "heavy punishment" for her acts. But punishment isn't revenge or trauma through humiliation.
What actually drove the mother
Let's not pretend this was thoughtful, corrective parenting.
Parents of minors are usually co-responsible for what their kids do. What I strongly believe is that the second this mother got named as a co-author of something monstrous, she inherited the public shame, and couldn't bear it. Perhaps the same flinch we had (almost) picking A, just with a razor in her hand.
Shaving her daughter's head was quick, visual, and satisfying to the people watching her reaction. It loudly announced that this family does not stand for this. That's not correction. That's a mother who couldn't tolerate her own shame, so she discharged it onto her kid and called it discipline.
This equation results in two traumatized bald teenagers instead of just one. Congratulations.
What a "good punishment" looks like
Punishment (or discipline), done right, has four features.
It's proportionate: the consequence matches the offense. It's educational: it shows what to do differently. It's calmly given: decided rationally, not in rage. And it's dignity-preserving: the kid's self-esteem remains, enabling learning.
The head-shaving scored zero on all four.
Was it proportionate? No. Bullying is a verbal and emotional crime, but forcing someone to shave their head is a public, physical violation. According to the mother, her daughter’s hair was long and curly, the kind that takes years to grow back.
Was it educational? No. The real lesson was that if the daughter embarrassed her mother, she would be humiliated in return.
Was the response calm? Almost certainly not. It seemed like a reaction driven by public embarrassment.
Did it preserve dignity? No, the act of forcibly removing someone’s hair is also stripping their identity, like the effect that bullying would have. Instead of undoing the harm, the mother repeated it, only with a different victim.
This is a response to my imaginary bully daughter, if I were her mother. And, yes, each step on this list would genuinely make her feel uncomfortable, if that's your goal.
I would require her to volunteer at a cancer center, so she can see the real people behind her actions. If she were my child, I’d make this commitment last at least a year;
She would need to give a real, supervised apology, both written and spoken, because taking responsibility matters. I’d take away her phone and internet until she can clearly explain what she did.
She would also join restorative circles to hear how her words affected others. I would consider separating her from the friends involved: not because I'm assuming she's some victim of bad company; she might be the ringleader. But research shows that when aggressive kids stay together, they can reinforce each other’s behavior. Bullying others could solidify the group identity, the core of what brings them together. Keeping the group together can make the problem worse.
And a few more, which I included below as examples when illustrating a different point of view, so I won't repeat them here. Keep reading. *
We can’t teach children to stop hurting others by doing the same to them.
That isn't discipline, or good punishment, or whatever you'd like to call it. It's simply adults abusing their power to shame someone weaker, using greater authority.
Now the objections, one at a time
I've spent more time than I'd like to admit thinking through this case and debating it in my head with others, so I chose the counterarguments I find most interesting to discuss.
"Your punishments aren't proportional to what she caused. She nearly drove a girl to suicide. A shaved head is mercy next to that."
That's revenge asking the question because it wants the hit. Justice asks a different one: what will actually address the harm? The harm was cruel, dehumanizing words aimed at a sick, vulnerable person, causing severe distress. The fitting response is forcing the daughter to confront the weight of it, make her repair what can be repaired, and restrict her freedom until she proves she understands. Shaving her head doesn't change any of that. It doesn't support the sick girl's healing journey, and it definitely doesn't help the bully understand why her words were so hurtful. Instead, it just adds another victim to the story.
And there is a very, very serious layer underneath the punishment discussion: if your child can push another child that close to death, that's a mental health emergency inside YOUR own home. A kid like that is either badly short on empathy, acting out of her own pain, or genuinely didn't grasp the weight of what she said. This is an SOS emergency that trauma definitely can't fix.
In fact, a humiliated, resentful teenager reflects less, not more. She'll spend her energy pitying herself and hating her mother, not feeling remorse for the girl she nearly buried.
"Fine, but the cancer girl gets nothing out of your plan. Where's the repair for her?"
If you take a moment to think about this question, congratulations! You've just come up with one of the best imaginary counterarguments in the whole list. This earns you some extra emotional intelligence points.
Every punishment on offer, head-shaving included, is bully-centric. It's all about fixing, breaking, or educating the bully, meaning the victim gets nothing.
(And, in parentheses here, this is pretty much how justice systems work worldwide: we focus solely on punishing the guilty person, and the victim is left with a "justice" feeling, which, honestly, is not repair. Anyway, let's not go there.)
That's a real failure of justice, so let me build the part that centers her, the person the whole outrage circus forgot the second the razor came out.
Effective restorative justice addresses three key questions: what does the victim need to heal, what actions can the offender take to make amends, and how can we prevent the cycle from repeating?
Here is the second set of actions the bully should take:
Restitution of dignity: the bully stole this girl's dignity by mocking her body, her illness, her weakest moment, so give some back. A genuine public apology, a video or letter the victim can share or bury as she chooses. The daughter standing in front of a counselor and the victim's family and saying out loud exactly what she said and why it was wrong.
Material repair, if applicable: the daughter fundraises, in the victim's name, for her bills, cancer research, or whatever charity the victim picks. Not with the parents' money. Her own effort, chores, selling her things, whatever. The effort is the point, not the sum.
The restorative circle, my favorite, because it hands the power to the victim: the bully sits across from her, if and only if she agrees, and asks one question: "What can I do to make this right?" The victim names her pain and defines what repair looks like FOR HER. Cancer strips agency, bullying strips agency, and this is where you hand some back.
"Fear works though. She'll never do it again because she'll remember how humiliated she felt."
If you think this is a valid counterargument, I am taking back some emotional intelligence points because it is the wrongest claim.
Most of the time, fear leads to avoidance rather than empathy. Punishment through fear and humiliation screams "don't get caught again." A kid beaten for stealing learns to steal more carefully; a kid humiliated for bullying learns to bully more quietly or pick targets who won't tell. That's external regulation, fear of consequences, not internal regulation, an actual conscience.
Also, the fear argument quietly assumes the mother is always in the room. What about college? The first apartment? The first job she can't reach into? If the only brake on cruelty is fear of someone's rage, that brake leaves when they do. That's not good parenting; it's temporary behavior suppression, and it collapses the second the enforcer walks out.
Why we secretly cheered
This woman almost received the 'Mother of the Year' award in Brazil. The number of people praising her was shocking. So, of course, we should look into why this occurred.
The hero-parent story: when a kid does something monstrous, we hunt for someone to blame, and when no clean culprit appears, a mother swinging swift and brutal feels like finally, someone did something. Someone made the awful feeling go away. In a era that loves calling parents soft, she reads as tough accountability. That's rare, so people applaud.
Justice "porn": we're wired for catharsis when a wrongdoer visibly suffers. Therapy and community service happen behind closed doors and give you nothing to feel. A shaved head is visible proof the bully paid. It even rhymes. She mocked someone's looks, so she lost hers. It's the poetic "eye for an eye" fable: satisfying, but ultimately pointless.
The tough-love myth remains strong. Many people still believe that harsh punishment builds character, and this situation proves it. The old saying, “My parents hit me, and I turned out fine,” is as common as ever.
Us versus them: Once someone is labeled a "bully," the daughter is no longer seen as a teenager with her own struggles. She becomes a symbol of cruelty. Punishing a symbol feels right and is easier because it lets you avoid the fact that she's still a child. It's easy to hurt a symbol.
The illusion of action: victim suffers, parents complain, schools shrug, nothing moves, people feel helpless, and it is unbearable. This mother broke the cyclical pattern with a wrong action, but it showed she cared enough to try to fix the situation, which is moral.
And some of it is just Brazil. We live with a mountain of unpunished crime and loose justice, so the second something looks like justice lands, we cheer louder than the moment deserves. But we already covered that: It looked like justice; it was actually revenge.
We, as society, tend to value vengeance over healing because is loud and instant and we can actually see it. It is hard to hold nuance on other people's lives, so we sort them into good and evil and skip the part where a bully is also a child, because that part hurts and makes us second-guess ourselves.
Quite often, we mistake punishment for parenting, and I used the word punishment instead of discipline throughout the whole essay on purpose.
A lot of people cheered the mother because they're scared of their own kids turning cruel, of their own kids being the target, and clapping for her feels like a spell against that future.
It isn't. It's just two shaved heads, and nobody healed or repaired.
So. Back to your exam.
If you picked A, you didn't fail because you're cruel or stupid. You flinched because the real picture was too uncomfortable to hold. The option A gave you somewhere to put that discomfort: she deserved it, justice was served, problem solved. And for a moment, the feeling went away.
But emotional intelligence isn't about having the right emotions; it's about handling the tough ones. Most feel the pull toward revenge and want a neat resolution. But the really hard part is sticking around and dealing with things when they're not perfect or when the resolution is slow, invisible, and uncertain.
It's being able to look at the bullied girl, the bully, the mother, the humiliation, the rage, the need for justice... and hold all of it at once without reaching for the answer that makes you feel better.
Because sometimes the most emotionally intelligent answer is also the least satisfying one.
B.
