How common is stitching head wounds on children without local anesthesia?

When my brother was little 5M (i think it was 2006, so not historic), he fell and had a cut on his forehead. My parents are both trained surgeons, and my father wanted to stitch his wound without using anesthesia (he didn't, when my mother insisted on using it). When I questioned my mother about this years later, she claimed that is was common, because the needles for injecting local anestetics where so large that children would have suffered equally and therefore anestetics weren't necessary. Is she right?