Photo: Noah Kalina

Once upon a time, a kid’s haircut was a simple affair, involving a harried mom armed with a pair of shears, or ten stoic minutes in a barber’s chair. Then again, once upon a time, a four-year-old with a mohawk was evidence of some mishap with the scissors, unlike today, when it’s just another cool kid sporting the Maddox.

The Maddox. The Ashton. The Lindsay. These are just a few of the hip, celeb-inspired styles on offer at one of the city’s kiddie hair salons, which, in the last few years, have been multiplying at a rate faster than you can say Bugaboo. The salons, with their brightly colored furniture and blaring TVs, have the vibe of Chuck E. Cheese meets Jean Louis David, and they charge anywhere from $19 to $30 for a no-wash cut. And there’s no shortage of frills to go with that trim. At Park Slope’s Kidz Cut Zone, a five-year-old cursed with dry tresses might try a $15 hot-oil treatment, while at one of the three Cozy’s Cuts for Kids, girls can indulge in a Shirley Temple mani/pedi for $22. Many of the salons sell—some parents say push—kid hair products, including colored gels, temporary dyes and styling pomades (priced starting at around $8 for eight ounces). And if all that doesn’t empty a wallet fast enough, let us not forget that each of the hair parlors doubles as a toy store because, owners explain, you can’t make NYC rents on $30 haircuts.

Some parents enter with trepidation for fear of exposing their kids to our beauty-product obsessed culture, or groan at these overstimulating hair meccas; one mom tells her son that the toys are just part of the decor. Others appreciate the convenience of one-stop shopping, allowing overbooked parents to stock up on birthday gifts. Love ’em or hate ’em, you can credit the craze to one woman: Cozy Friedman, the doyenne of the kiddie-cut movement. It was Friedman who recognized—back in the Kinder Dark Ages of 1992—that the city that had everything was missing a hair place just for kids. “A friend of mine had told me that she was asked to leave a salon because her kid was crying. It was a lightning-bolt moment,” she says.

Twelve years after opening her Madison Avenue salon in 1994, Friedman has spawned numerous imitators and two more shops of her own, including a new shop on Second Avenue, where, on a recent afternoon, scores of young boys in Polo sweaters, each looking like Grayer from The Nanny Diaries, swept in with their sitters or, less often, their moms, picked out a DVD and plunked down in one of the race-car chairs while one of two chirpy young stylists went to work. This being the Upper East Side, most were going for what Friedman calls “the John-John—neat, tapered, parted on the side,” although some kids requested a little gel to spike their new ’dos.

Over the East River, such experimentation is par for the course. Brigitte Prat opened Lulu’s Cuts and Toys (48 Fifth Ave, 718-832-3732) after moving to Park Slope in 1998, in part because she didn’t want to schlep all the way to Cozy’s to get her daughter, Lulu, a trim. Though Prat is obviously a funky mama herself, with a wristful of bangles barely covering her tattoos, she says it’s the parents, not the salons, pushing the envelope on their kids’ cool quotient.

Indeed, Cozy Friedman claims she’s not so much innovating new hair trends as picking up on what ever-more-discerning parents want for their kids. “I just follow the market,” she says. “And the market has caught on that parents are willing to spend a lot of money on their children.” Even if that means transforming their toddler into a Sid Vicious clone.

Head cases

Five kids go undercover and get their hair cut. Here are their moms’ verdicts.