Using Toys to Make Bath Time Fun

While we talk a lot about using toys to help children develop, one of the most appreciated side effects of providing our children with toys would have to be that it simply makes things easier on the parent. Giving a child a bath can be one of the most stressful and taxing parts of a parent's day. It really shouldn't be so difficult, but the fact is that most children find bathing to be profoundly boring. Even if a bath only lasts, say, ten minutes, how many children do you know who are willing to sit still for ten full minutes? As adults, the morning or evening shower is a much-appreciated part of the day. Fifteen hours and forty-five minutes out of the day, we're working, taking care of the kids, driving around, making dinner, and rarely have a moment to ourselves. The sanctity and the peace and quiet of a fifteen-minute shower, then, is, for many of us, our only chance to really unwind. Children don't see it that way. For young children, a bath is ten or fifteen minutes away from our toys, away from our favourite TV shows, and away from every other fun thing imaginable. So bath time toys seem like an obvious solution. However, there is something of a psychology to this. Letting your kid bring some of their water-safe toys to the tub might keep them distracted long enough to get clean, but what you really want to do is teach them to actively enjoy bath time. There are two simple steps to this: 1. Provide your kids with entertaining, stimulating toys for bath time, and 2. Only allow your kids to play with these bath time toys in the tub. It's a simple little psychological trick, but a useful one. They will associate some of their favourite toys with bath time, and will then learn to have fun in the tub. It's not much different than, say, providing desert after dinner, so that children will start to appreciate eating healthy as an enjoyable experience by way of association. It's a good idea to start developing this notion early on with baby toys for the tub. Besides of course being bath-safe and fun, bath toys are also designed to teach kids to take delight in splishin' and splashin'. For example, there are a number of friendly sea-life toys, like a starfish with a spinning water wheel, and a lobster you can use to fill up and pour water out of. The reason these toys work so well is because they're just not as fun to play with outside of the bathtub. This comes down to one of the basic rules of selecting toys to encourage healthy behaviour and attitudes in children. That being that they encourage a certain type of play within a certain context. By getting your kids hooked on bath toys like these ones, they learn to associate the tub with fun and come to think of bath time as an enjoyable activity, and not, as many children see it, something of a chore