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Alexis Ohanian turned to the internet to learn how to do his daughter's hair

The Reddit co-founder and husband of Serena Williams wanted extra help styling his daughter's hair.
Serena Williams's husband Alexis Ohanian trying to learn how to do daughter's hair
Alexis Ohanian gives a kiss to his daughter, Alexis Olympia, as he watches his wife Serena Williams play a tennis match earlier this year.Getty Images
/ Source: TODAY

Raising a girl often involves doing hair, and doting dad Alexis Ohanian is all for it, although he admits he needs some help.

As co-founder of Reddit, Ohanian obviously knows he can mine the internet for advice on styling the hair of the year-old daughter he shares with his wife, Serena Williams. But the specific type of guidance he recently sought is earning Ohanian some major props online.

“Just applied to join 4 private Natural Hair facebook groups. I hope they don't auto-reject my application when they see my profile photo,” he said in a tweet. “I told them it was to keep getting better at doing my daughter’s hair.”

The post has prompted hundreds of comments, mostly offering praise for Ohanian’s efforts and advice on where to seek information about styling natural hair.

“You are an amazing dad, and there is so much that is said in this simple gesture,” one commenter wrote in a response. “This is more than hair. This is you saying I care about my little girl. Hair is typically an important thing in a girls’ life. This is you showing her you value her interests.”

Many fathers shared pictures of their own efforts to style their children’s hair, as well as guidance on where to find tutorials.

One parent wrote, “There are a ton of excellent YouTube vids; I’ll bet there are also local meetups. BUT ... I’ll also bet that you could go to the salon once a week with your daughter (date!) and they’ll teach you. I have two daughters and have been too reliant on YouTube. Godspeeed!”

Ohanian, 36, regularly posts images of his namesake daughter, whom he described as “strong and beautiful” in one recent post.

He also is a regular on the sidelines of the matches of his tennis superstar wife. Ohanian recently said he’s fine that many people refer to him as “the husband of Serena Williams.”

“I think it’s a very cheeky, clever editorial decision. Because obviously it’s a rebuke to the double standard,” Ohanian told TODAY Parents.

“If we want to get to the end goal, where no one considers the wife to be just the partner of a successful man, then part of that is us having the normalcy of the husband as the partner of the successful wife.”

Ohanian recently has been on a crusade to encourage more companies to offer paid paternity leave, something he took advantage of after his wife faced life-threatening complications following the birth of their daughter.

“Going through the experience we went through, I am one hundred times more of an advocate for paternity leave, because we got really close to a really, really awful situation, and I will never forget what that feels like,” he said. “And we had every advantage in the world for us. I could not imagine anyone else going through that with anything less.”