My 8 yo still prefers baths. She needs help adjusting initial water temp., too. She will then finish her bath on her own, but, still comes out with a head of poorly rinsed shampoo bubbles sometimes.
Those fixtures are called shower slide bars, and they are certainly available in the U.S. We got ours at either Home Depot or Lowes (I forget which.)
Thanks! Here’s one with good reviews for 50 buckson Amazon. A good sliede bar allows to adjust not only the height, but also the angle of the shower head. it allows kids to put the shower beneath their head, and to push the shower away when it suddenly gets too cold or hot. I should think that makes it easier for a young kid to shower.
That’s really great, I think that will actually help a lot. She does do better when I stand there and hold the shower nozzle just behind her head. I thought she was calmer because I was in the room, but maybe it’s because the angle of the shower is that important when you’re her size!
Does she have the same behaviour when she’s showering at her father’s?
My mother tried to get me to start taking showers when I was six. It didn’t catch on until I was ten. I just loved bath time too much.
Those shower slide bars often come equipped with a hand-shower. Having that in the tub would make it easy for her to wash and rinse her hair in a bath, instead of having to take a full-blown shower. The down side is it’d be very easy for her to lose her grip on it and get water all over the bathroom.
My daughter’s seven and I suppose she’s far too dependent! I never even thought about letting her turn on the water for herself. I set up the bath while she gets undressed. She has soap fingerpaints so she can handle the bathing and just in the past few weeks she’s become brave enough to pour water on her head. We do the shampooing and conditioning together and she rinses. I do the final rinse from the faucet so it’s clean water. She’s still terrified of the shower, but that could be the sensory issues that come with autism.
Apparently so. He doesn’t seem as concerned with it; he thinks it’s age appropriate behavior. Since most of the time she showers there, it rarely bugs me, but yesterday she was showering here. 
That’s what those gaily colored shower curtainsare for !
But yeah, I would hate it if the shower head was always our of my reach and above my head. Showering would seem too much like getting waterboarded.
I hope that will help your kid, WhyNot! IN the meantime, do what my husband does; he keeps our toddler company in the bathroom while listening to his favourite podcasts.
Mine weren’t necessarily good with showers at that age, but they didn’t really get the choice you are giving her. They either showered by themselves, or the bathed by themselves. So at seven it was still mostly baths. Now its about 50/50 depending…if they are busy they know a shower is quicker. But if they want to read, reading in the tub is still a favorite.
You’ve gotten good advice already, just adding another data point.
I have a 7 year old boy who bathes by himself. I start the water for him (mostly because he doesn’t understand the idea of just give it a dang minute to adjust when you turn the knob) and get it at the right temp, then he climbs in and turns the water off when it’s where he wants it. He washes himself with a bar of soap and can wet the back of his head by leaning back. He has “washed”* it himself before but I usually let him play and go in and wash his hair at the end and use the shower sprayer to fully rinse the shampoo, soap residue and nasty butt water off him. I usually help him dry off and powder and bring him clean undies and PJs but that’s less an issue of his not being able to do it, just that it can get darn cold if you are a shaking wet 7 year old. He will very occasionally shower, but mostly sticks to baths so he can play with his toys and because he doesn’t like water in his eyes. He truly believes that a spritz of water in the face is equivalent to waterboarding. Who am I to judge? Maybe he has very sensitive eyes. 
I also have a 10 year old. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve had to help him, but nowadays the showering involves full dress into a locked bathroom and “Oh god don’t look at me!” should a situation arise where I have to hand a towel or toilet paper in there.
*His version of hair washing without help results in a soapy mound on the top of his head and dry sides by the time he is done. He’s trying, he just isn’t quite there.
That’s pretty much where my kid is too, even though she’s 8.5. She can try to wash her hair but she’s no good at it–to be fair, her hair is so thick that it actively repels water and it’s objectively difficult hair to wash thoroughly. I let her sit and play/soap in the tub for a while and then go in and do her hair and rinse her off.
For my kids, this was a sticking point. They were used to baths facilitated by an adult. We sort of eased them into it. They weren’t afraid of the shower per se, they just didn’t like the idea of change. It was a multistep process.
Step 1: Let them get a bath themselves while we were in the bathroom with them (but did nothing)
Step 2: Let them get a bath themselves in an adjacent room
Step 3: Let them just go and do it all themselves
Step 4: Shower with Mom or Dad helping with getting it started and stopped
Step 5: Shower with Mom or Dad in the bathroom but them doing it themselves
Step 7: Shower with Mom or Dad in an adjacent room
Step 8: Profit!
The key to success here was to be excited at each milestone (‘I knew you could do it.’ ‘You are such a big boy/girl.’) There were some cranky moments and some bouts of hesitation but we got there.
My daughter was almost 7 when she went through the process and my son was about 5 1/2. There are still some times when I have to send one of them back for lack of rinsing but otherwise they are clean and excited about being independant.
I think your child is giving you a very clear message that she’s not ready. Temperature changes on young skin are far more painful than for adults. It’s more like when the temp hits an open wound for us.
Is there any reason that you can’t just run a bath for her and let her clean herself, then come back to start the shower and rinse her off? I totally get the need to walk away and actually accomplish something, but your current situation is the worst of all worlds. If you put her in a position to defend her inability, then it will be years before she overcomes it, and may even develop into a phobia.
Celtling is 6, and she bathes almost entirely on her own in the tub, but I always help with the rinse off as our hot water is incredibly hot. (small water heater; it’s the only way.)
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. It’s very possible that she just wants your attention. My son is 7 and can handle a shower well by himself (though like you, we do have to turn the water on, set the temperature; sometimes an adult will come in to make sure he’s being thorough enough). He also likes a few minutes of alone time in there to just let the water run over him. That said, he likes someone to watch him brush. Not because he can’t, but he just likes someone to watch him brush his teeth (which isn’t a bad thing because sometimes he’ll just barely skim his teeth and thinks he’s done).
Then she needs to be independent or go back to baths. I’m a mean mother that way. (Though I would get a pump bottle of shampoo before I’d go that far).
At seven, my kids were capable of doing it by themselves - but I think they were both pretty much still bath kids that young.
Since it’s been resurrected, an update: she’s mostly independent in the shower now! I still start the water for her, but she does all the water adjusting after that, and the hygiene is all her.
Things that helped:
Deep breaths (on my part) and reminding myself that my daughter isn’t actually a jerk. If she “just needs attention,” then that’s a valid need, too. So I gave her, temporarily, a little more attention around shower time.
Letting her pick out a new bath scrubbie. Apparently pink is key.
Hippie soap. :rolleyes: We tried the felted soap, and she said it was too scratchy. But she loves her little biofriendly honey and calendula (expensive) liquid soap. Seeing a $12.99 price tag on soap is a bit of a sticker shock. It’s a price I’m willing to pay for peace. Oh well.
Lowering the shower head. The landlord said no to the extender bar, but I did take the idea, and was able to rig a shower head extender out of a stretched out coat hanger hung off the pipe where it comes out of the wall. Getting the shower head down so it was just a few inches above her head made a world of difference. It stayed there for about 5 months, and then I gradually raised it, and now she uses the shower at the normal height.
A turban style hair towel and a (pink) wrap towel with velcro around the top. She loves the “spa” styling of her after-bath attire.
My daughter, apparently, has first world problems, with first world solutions. 
Only reading this now, after the solution has been found, I’m very glad the solution was a little bit of extra love.
In the children’s home where I used to work, it was one of those “little signs”, seeing how very young children approach a shower. If you see a 4/5/6 year old step under a shower and scrub themselves down independently… there’s something wrong with that. It’s usually the children who’ve come from harsh institutions, but I saw a few who came from abusive homes. It makes something very deep inside you want to say: “you don’t need to step under the shower like that”. I would ask if they needed help rinsing out the shampoo, careful not to get shampoo in your eyes honey, hold out a towel for them to step into and dry them gently. I wanted to try to make them more dependent, because children should be able to depend on grown ups for the scary difficult things. Seeing children who do grown up things far too routinely isn’t… right.
I guess I’m saying this just so if you read this you might be grateful for the little dependencies that you take for granted, or that annoy you. It’s a sign that all is right in the world, it means that your little one is loved. I don’t mean it in a critical way at all, and of course some children are just very independent. And obviously nobody wants for their children what I described. But I’m just putting out there the other end of the spectrum. It makes me happy when I read about children like WhyKid, who grow up knowing they can depend on mummy to adjust the shower head and help them with the temperature and buy them a pink towel.
gracer, what a fantastic point of view, thank you so much for sharing that! My kids are 13 years apart, so it’s easy to forget exactly what my son was doing at her age - and he’s just generally a more independent personality than she is, so it’s like comparing apples and oranges sometimes. That’s why I wanted to check in when I did, to see if my expectations were a little off, and yes, they were.
I bristle when people say, “s/he’s doing it for attention,” as if that’s a reason to ignore a person. If they’re “doing it for attention,” then isn’t the obvious solution to give them some attention? Maybe a redirected attention, or attention at some other time when they’re not doing something annoying, but in this case, attention at the time and situation when she was clearly calling for it was indeed appropriate. And when I saw that, and gave it, truly and without frustration and resentment, it wasn’t long before she didn’t need that extra attention any more.