All parents, even parents of teenagers, will remember how great it feels when you can finally drop off your child for a playdate instead of being dragged along for the ride.

It was with this kind of exuberance that I dropped off my 4-year-old, Kira, at her friend’s house a few weeks ago. With glee, I left her with the friend’s adorable au pair, who I knew from a semester’s worth of pickups and drop-offs to be engaging and responsible.

I hurried to get my older children during the afternoon stretch of picking up and dropping off and picking up again. It was a pleasure to be solo — a tired Kira is usually dragged along. I had quite a spring in my step when a couple hours later, I rang the doorbell to collect my daughter.

“I have very bad news for you,” the au pair told me with a contrite look on her face — not exactly the words you want to hear from the baby sitter. How bad could the news be, I thought. I could hear the girls playing happily next door.

“Kira has cut her hair off,” she said.

“Off?” I gasped.

At this moment, out bounced Kira sporting her new hairstyle: bangs. Lots of bangs.

Right, I thought to myself. I am not making a big deal of this.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told the au pair. “It looks great. Kira, let’s go.”

Considering the fact that Kira, her friend, and a pair of scissors had been left unattended for a few minutes, it did look great. I certainly didn’t have to rush off to find some overpriced Cozy’s Cuts for Kids stylist to rectify the matter.

Kira’s chop, and the second chop that followed a few weeks later (short, spiky bangs), is the first sign of the changing tides in our house.

For the past five years, I have spent a few hours a day breaking up fights between my two eldest children, who are boys. If there was one part of my life as a parent that I found exhausting and unsatisfying, it was pulling one boy, howling, off the other.

“Unless you have two boys that are close in age, don’t even think about judging me,” I fantasized about shouting to the people around me who stared, horrified, as my boys tried to claw each other’s eyes out in the supermarket, the elevator, the diner, the playground, and the lobby.

Then one day last fall, I noticed that there was peace. The boys were spending far more time playing together than trying to annihilate each other. The ball that they used to fight over is now the ball they use to play together. War, Boggle, paper airplanes, and Monopoly occupy them for hours.

But you can never get too comfortable as a parent. The second you breathe out a sigh of relief, or dare to pat yourself on the back for weathering a storm, there is a new tempest on the horizon.

In my case, the storm is in the form of a bossy, controlling, manipulative, sensitive, scissor-wielding 4-year-old (Kira) and her sidekick little sister, Talia, who is almost 2.

While I am now primed to referee in the World Wrestling Federation, I am as wet behind the ears as a newborn puppy in the area of clothing-related tantrums, the need to be well-liked by fashionable classmates, mean girls who bully, and several other girl-specific issues.

“You cannot let the crazy world of girls get to you,” a mother of two girls and one boy told me when I asked for tips on raising great girls. “They say that boys are harder to raise in the early years and that girls are harder to deal with later on, when they’re teenagers. But the real truth is that girls are harder to raise. Period, end of story.”

“Girls can be so horrible to each other,” an elementary school teacher said. “They jockey for social positions and bully each other. But the parents these days make things worse. Instead of helping their children understand the right thing to do and reminding them about decency and kindness, they’re much more concerned with helping their own child actually be popular.”

I never thought I’d feel wistful for the days when the boys were busy punching each other’s lights out. Breaking up their battles may have required an enormous amount of physical energy. But from where I stand now, that seems relatively undemanding compared to the amount of emotional energy that it takes to convince my daughter to get dressed in the morning — or that it will take to stay calm when my daughter shears her locks off for the third time.

sarasberman@aol.com