Kids Avoid Baths in Summer

What is it about summer that makes kids hate baths? It’s the same argument that has been used for years against making the bed in the morning – why go to the trouble when you’re just going to fall into the bed again that night? Likewise, the summer anti-bath argument goes: Why take a bath tonight when you’re just going to go swimming/play outside/get sweaty again tomorrow?

To kids, getting wet via lake, swimming pool, or garden hose will pass for bathing. This time of year, when one hot day just melts into the next, you do question why you’re being such a stickler for what seems like a wasted routine. A friend admits that she has sent her boys to bed as “dirty as polecats” just to avoid wrangling them into the bathtub. “They’re just going to run outside again first thing the next morning,” she reasons. Truly, the bath ends up covered in muddy foot prints and with a new ring around the tub anyway.

Summer is a dirty season. You walk outside fresh and clean, buoyed by the light fragrance of your citrus moisturizer, only to feel a trickle of sweat down your back as you unlock your car door. How did southerners ever manage to wear petticoats and rest on sleeping porches 100 years ago? And you’re telling me anti-perspirant didn’t catch on until it was mass-marketed in the late 1950′s? A lavender sachet could only do so much.

Maybe this refusal to bathe is one of the last privileges of youth, a harmless indulgence before puberty hits. Soon enough we’ll be explaining shaving cream, deoderant, and other personal hygiene products that are necessary in order to prevent repulsing the opposite sex. Once the hormones kick in, we won’t have to insist on a bath. Instead we’ll be complaining about all the Axe body wash we are buying.