Bathtime!

Our 21 month old loved bathtime up until a couple of months ago now he hates it with a passion and becomes hysterical whenever we try to get him in it! We've tried everything we can think of, not bathing him for a couple of weeks, letting him pick new bath toys and play in the bath with no water which he's fine with, even putting him in the bath with us but nothing seems to work. We're now getting a bit desperate and are reduced to one screaming bath a week with very good washes in between! Anyone got any ideas on how we can get our water baby back?!

Hi Zoe,

My son was exactly the same, fortunatly for us he grew out of it within 6 months !

I think you have to be patient and calm, which is admitadly not one of my strong points either.

My advice: Try to make it a short and sweet trip to the bath, he will slowly learn.

As a question do you have any bath toys to help take his mind of the water thing lol ?

We have a water mill thing, alphabet numbers and water colourant almong other things which i believe helped to take his mind of the water being there !

Good luck hunni - its not fun i know that !

xx

Did anything happen to make him not like the bath any more?

Does he have a doll or teddy? perhaps it might be worth making a game of running a shallow bath and giving doll/teddy a bath - it might help to reinforce that bathtime is not dangerous and is supposed to be fun!

my daughter had the same kinda thing when she was little,when she got hold of the *grown up* soap and got it in her eyes; i couldn't get her back in the bath......so i took it back to basics, got a baby bath (that she was too big for LOL) spread towels out in the living room and made it a very warm comfortable place to be and sat by the bath with her in it, listening to her fav music etc while she got used to the bath again, taking my time to get her fear of the soap and shampoo to lessen before i moved her to the big bath....when in the big bath first with me in with her i played the music we had been listening to, and put in bubbles etc and toys and had fun......it only took about 3 weeks from her being petrified of the bath, to her being happy to get in there and splash around.......

Thanks for the tips guys, we'll give them a go. Being a typical boy he doesn't do teddies but does have a blankey that he's surgically attached to at bedtime so maybe we'll try bathing that tomorrow! To answer your questions he has loads of bath toys and loves playing with them all in the bath as long as there's no water in it!! Can't think of anything that scared him into not liking baths anymore, he had an ear infection at one point but I think that was after he'd started refusing to get in the bath anyway! 😀

My 22 month old did the same a few weeks ago. I started to take her swimming more which she loves and bought her some really bubbly bubbles. I started to say Lets go and play with the bubbles rather than take a bath and that seemed to work.