Mumsnet Talk

I don't totally understand, but I can tell you now that making the game fun & cheap is the only way you'll have much success with it.

The space saving bit is a good idea. Children don't need an adult sized bath full of water. I think you should focus on that side and ditch the preachy side. Maybe go for a range of 'bath gym' inflatables?

And stay away from anything involving electricity. I was chatting with a person who used to test new product ideas for major retailers. He said that nobody is willing to touch anything that involves baths and electricity. He also said that he himself used to get his wife to test those products!

But surely to teach them to value of water you don't bath them so often or do a really shallow bath.

You tell them to turn the tap off when they brush their teeth.

Children love the fact that they can splash around in a bath. A space saver may actually really annoy them. There's a good chance they'd say 'Get that out of here.'

A 2 year old has no concept of the value of water. Perhaps you need to target slightly older children who might understand this concept a bit better. A 6 yr old will have more of an idea.

Kids love the bath though and some sort of small ish thing for the bath could be great. A green message would be a nice little selling point also.

If it's quite big: where will it be stored when not in use? Many people have small ish baths and bathrooms.

Hope this is useful. All the best!

My 2.5 yo ds likes to have the run of the bath to splash in. He is also way too young to understand the concept you're talking about.

I would not want some big, weighted inflatable clogging up the bathroom and I'm not blowing something up at bath time. My bathroom has enough toys in it and ds gets bored with bath toys so I've retired some of the bigger ones he was bought as gifts. He's happiest with my joseph joseph measuring cups & bowls! I've had to split them with him!

As for depth and temperature I can work that out myself.

If there was an inflatable on the bottom of the bath my 15 month old ds would climb out in a millisecond. He'd fall onto the floor and bump his head - therefore I would not buy something like this.

I definitely wouldn't like to be to be told the depth and temperature of baths. It's too bossy.

I like in Australia so saving water is a big thing here. From a really young age children are taught not to leave taps running or splash water out if the pool.

Nearly every child I know has showers rather than baths. Even the tiny ones, as they use less water. Toddlers and babies will have a shower with their parents.

While I am all for saving water, I really hate the idea of an interactive toy for the bath. Why can't bath time be about splashing and sploshing? Why does everything have to involve the use of a screen?
I also am on a water meter, so momitoring water use is something that I do instinctively.

No. This isn't going to work. Bath time with one child is a time to relax and unwind, you don't want to start lengthy conversations about ecology at bedtime.

Bath time with two children involves both children in the bath.

By the time the eldest child is old enough for the saving water lecture, mother is either pregnant or has another baby.

If she has a baby, she's holding the baby whilst the elder child amuses himself happily for a few precious moments before she scrubs him and puts him to bed.

If she's pregnant, she's exhausted.

If the younger child is old enough to go in the bath, he will go in with the older child and therefore there will be no room for the toy.

I'm afraid that it wouldn't be something I'd be interested in. My children would rather have less water in a bigger bath than be restricted to one end of it. I'm not all that keen on bath toys either - they tend to be expensive for what they are and end up covered in black mould which is very hard to remove without using nasty chemicals. We'll be sticking with empty bottles and sponges.

Sound like something my son would try to climb.

I'm not sure about the educational side, but I would be very interested in a cost effective bath space saver for the bath. DH & I often joke about putting a couple of breeze blocks in to make the water go further!

My gut reaction is that my DS (3) would try and climb or, or slip off the side of such a gadget. I'd just walk past it on the shelf.

My gut reaction is that you'd be better off, for this age group, looking at a game where you can displace water - put balls in a tube and see the water rise, see how far it reaches in a flat / wide container, tap to turn water off and on between two chambers. The eco message is too much too young.

Also, 2 - 6 is a big age group. You could make a water limited for taps in infants schools so they can't be left on, where there are not already push top taps, and this would cover 4 - 6 but I think you'll struggle to find anything that works across the whole of this age range.

You're probably not still after responses, but I'm procrastinating and will answer pretty much anything, so...

There's already a baby bathwater barrier called BabyDam which just acts like a wall that blocks off one end of the bath. I haven't got one but it looks as though it rolls up small, installs easily and can't be climbed on. I'm afraid I wouldn't use your inflatable idea because:
1) If I kept it inflated I'd have nowhere to store it other than on the bathroom floor where it would get manky.
2) I'd never bother deflating it after bathtime and re-inflating it each time. And I wouldn't have had the puff to do it even if I'd wanted to for most of this pregnancy. The last thing people want when they have small children is something that adds faff and effort to their lives.
3) My toddler would climb on it and try to get out of the bath.
4) We save water by just having fewer baths.
As others have said, 2-6 is just a huge age range. Two-year-olds are generally still getting the hang of plastic cutlery and short sentences; there are six-year-olds who can solder and write computer programmes.
Sorry!