Fighting Bath Fear?
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Thursday, June 24, 2010 7:49 PM
My formerly bath-loving toddler now hates the bath.
Back in March, he took a tumble in the bath. We were on vacation, it was a bigger tub than usual, and he went under. It was no one’s fault; my husband was sitting right there, but would have needed unrealistically fast reflexes to stop the dive. Accidents happen.
Blaise was only underwater for a second or two. He might have inhaled a teaspoonful, but was otherwise fine.
The bad result: he became afraid of the bath.
It’s been more than three months since the last time Blaise took a bath willingly. I went searching the archives here, thinking maybe I’d written about his old bath-loving ways, and sure enough, I did. Reading that post shocked me. It seems crazy that he was ever actually enthusiastic about getting in the tub.
He still likes water as a toy, and will happily play with his sister while she’s bathing, but he insists on standing outside the tub. Put him in, and he wails and tries to climb out.
Honestly, we did try forcing Blaise to take a bath. My husband and I worked together: one of us washed him while the other kept him from climbing out of the tub. But he cried the whole time, and neither of us felt comfortable with the approach. Especially since a similar tactic backfired on with Camilla - she hated having her hair washed, so we’d just dump the water over her head to get it over with, and she eventually developed a hair-washing phobia that took months of patient work to undo.
So for months now, at bath time, we wash Camilla in the tub while Blaise gets a sponge-bath on the mat. It makes a mess, but we can get him clean without tears, so we deal with it.
Except… I would really like to get him back to a point where he’ll take baths again. For our convenience, of course, but also for his own sake. It seems like he’s afraid of all water now (he freaked out when we got near a pool recently) and I’d love him to be able to enjoy it again.
Can you help? Have you ever had a little one who had a traumatic experience and suddenly became afraid of water? Did you manage to solve the problem?
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