Coming Soon

Gentle Roots: A Trauma-Informed Caregiver's Guide to Textured Hair Care

Hair is never just hair, and for Black and biracial children in foster care, kinship placements, and adoptive homes, it often becomes the first place they figure out whether the adults around them can be trusted.

Gentle Roots is a practical, trauma informed guide for caregivers who want to do this work well and are starting from scratch. Drawing on nearly two decades in child welfare and community mental health, H. Montinique writes about textured hair the way someone teaches a friend in a bathroom on a Sunday afternoon. Wash day. Detangling without tears. Protective styles. What to do when the hair you have just been handed is in rough shape. The book treats hair care as relationship building, with attention to the emotional weight a child may be carrying into the chair, and gives caregivers the language and the patience to meet it.

No prior expertise required. Just a willingness to learn, and to show up.

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