There’s a trope about the battles that parents have trying to get their kids to take a bath. Not babies and toddlers, who understandably may have a fear of what is to them deep water. Older children who love to go swimming but have to be pursued when it’s bath time.
It that something real? Have showers made baths obsolete? Is it just a joke that cartoonists use way past its selling point (today’s Broom Hilda, which made me think of the question) or is it just a leftover subject from when showers were not yet a thing?
And the trope seems always to be about boys. Is there really a difference between boys and girls in bathing or just another girls can’t be naughty or difficult stereotype?
In my ancient and fuzzy memory, bath time for I and my bros was the end of TV and the start of going to bed. Screw that noise.
My wife’s daughter now fosters a horde of 7 kids, the oldest of which is now 6. Mostly, but not entirely girls. Bath time signals end of play and time for bed. If they’re already sleepy, they seem to go along willingly enough. If they still want to play with GM & GP (wife & I), then bath time is a major crisis.
So I’m not sure it’s the bath vs. shower difference.
Another possibility at least for some kids. I’m very cold-blooded and always have been. A bath was always a frigid experience to me even if the water started out hot. A shower in extremely hot water is a much warmer experience. Although even for me now, the most miserable ~10 minutes of my day are from when the shower is turned off and I instantly start to freeze due to evaporative cooling until I’ve fully dried off and fully dressed.
Even now I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a bath. I tried a time or two back when we had a big jacuzzi tub a couple of houses ago. Could not ever get it hot enough to be anything but neutral to cooling. Nothing remotely soothing about that misery.
If half of all people are cold-natured and the other half hot-natured, then half of all kids would hate baths because they represent freezing to death for 10+ minutes. While not having fun doing something else.
That’s my best recollection of my own childhood. I rather liked being in the bath. What I didn’t like was having to shift gears and get around to getting in the bath.
Said recollection may be influenced by the fact that that’s rather how I feel about it now –
When I was a kid between certain ages (maybe 8-12) I absolutely hated taking showers and baths. Part of it was that I was afraid I would miss out on something good, especially whatever was on TV. But part of it was that I hated being wet. I don’t remember exactly why I hated being wet. I do remember that I hated washing my hair even more than I hated showering the rest of my body. I think that had to do with the chance of getting shampoo or water in my eyes. People complained that I stank, but I was apparently immune to my own stench, so I didn’t care. Then when I was about 13 I suddenly started to care about whether I stank and finally started showering without being forced to.
I didn’t like the arbitrariness of being ordered to do something I considered pointless. “I command you to get wet and then dry yourself!” It’s like being ordered to count to 200.
Even now, I shower every morning but my wife sometimes suggests showering before bed as well. My instant reaction is “Why? I want to go to sleep immediately and I’ll just have to shower again in 8 hours anyways.”
That’s interesting. I don’t mind entering the bath tub, but i still hate the start of a shower. It’s either shocking cold or painfully hot. I always start with cold, because that’s less unpleasant, and then gradually turn up the temp as i get used to it. But i have a handheld shower, and start with it at my feet, and i wait until it’s only a little unpleasant on my feet before i bring it up to wet the rest of me. I really hate showing at hotels, where i don’t have that control.
I don’t love getting out of the bath or shower, but i don’t hate it like i hate getting into the shower.
Anyway, my kids never objected to baths, but we didn’t bathe them every day when they were old enough to care.
Jacuzzis suck, ,you are very correct, once filled unless they have the in line eutetic heating [in the make it go bubbly tubes] they do go cold. Now a proper hot tub on the other hand, ours stayed at a good solid 103 F all the time [until the pump had an issue then we took it offline while waiting for the part to arrive someone torched our house, so no more hot tub =(]
Me personally [F62] am of that bath tub not shower generation [I think at most one had bath tubs with added showers, I don’t know if I ever saw a strictly shower stall for bathing other than in my grandfathers Canadian summer house and our NY summer cottage] We were tubbed until I was 9 [we moved from a big Victorian where the kids suite bathroom had a deep tub only crappy but pic 24 ]
My 14 year old absolutely refuses to take a shower and has to be fought to get in the bath. He just has no desire whatsoever to be clean, look nice, or anything else. He just wants to live his life and his mean Mom keeps getting in the way of that.
I dont think I took more than one shower before college, where that was the only option. In fact, my parents limited me to one bath a day in high school. I read all of Narnia in the tub. I still prefer a soak with a book to a shower.
Mini-Mouse took loooong baths (with books) until age 10. She hated showers she had to take (at hotels, after swimming, at camp). Then suddenly wanted only shorter (but not short) showers. Had something to with her getting a tablet on which she could watch videos and play games, I’m sure.
She’s an uncommunicative teenager now (is that redundant?) but we’ve always been able to gauge her mental well being by whether she’s singing/humming in the bath/shower or not.
What I remember from being a four-year-old is not wanting to interrupt whatever I was doing to take a bath; then once I’d been coaxed into the tub, not wanting to get out and my parents having to deal with that as well.
My kids were always good about bath time. However, my daughter went through a short time when she was afraid of the bathtub drain. Apparently it’s a common fear. So common that Fred Rogers wrote a book about it.