Your Child’s Biggest Bath Time Problems Solved
Most kids love a bath!
It’s usually a wonderful time but it can, sometimes, throw up some challenges for parents.
So, here are some top tips you might find helpful.
A child terrified of water
This is relatively unusual if a baby and then toddler have been bathed since birth, however, it can happen.
If that’s the case, try letting your child decide how deep the water in the bath can be. Slowly but surely over time, you should be able to increase the depth and eliminate their fear.
Taking a bath together
This often happens even if you don’t want it to – thanks to your child throwing water everywhere!
You can partly overcome this by getting a bath divider, meaning you can be in the bath, dry, at the same time as your child is getting wet. It can also help you to economise on water.
Refusal to go into the bathroom
Children can be smart and devious!
Once they learn to associate bath time with a pre-bedtime step, you may start to see a reluctance to play the game and even a refusal to enter the bathroom.
There are two possible answers to this:
- do their bath some time before they go to bed (if possible), to break the perceived link;
- put plenty of toys in the bath and make it a fun time they look forward to.
Shampoo in the eyes
Children seem to have an innate ability to claim they have shampoo in their eyes even when there is not a trace of such anywhere near the bath!
How they learn this is unclear but of course, sometimes it does genuinely happen. Even though modern child-safe shampoos are incredibly mild, that can cause them some alarm.
There is no easy answer to this and many toddlers will wriggle furiously when you’re trying to carefully shampoo their hair and then rinse it. One good trick is to place a toy above the bath and get them to look at it while you’re working on their hair. You can ask them some questions on it to keep their head back.
Throwing water around
The easy answer is to say “get used to it” but there are some practical steps you can take:
- put plenty of towels on the floor;
- use rubber mats too;
- avoid wearing clothes you don’t want to get wet!
Your children will learn eventually.
Peeing into the bathwater
In the case of younger kids, this is probably just going to happen.
You can put them on the potty before getting into the bath and as they get older, gently and jokingly explain that they should pee on the potty, not into the bathwater.
Don’t make a big thing of it – they’ll learn faster than you might imagine.
