AIBU to think that bathing your kids once a week is not 'neglect'.

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This is spurred on by another threat about someone struggling to keep their house clean. They mentioned that their kids are bathed once a week. This caused a lot of negativity amongst posters, with some comments calling bathing your kids once a week 'neglect'. This surprised me!!

My DC is 4 and has on average 2 baths a week (and yes, sometimes that means 1 a week). It has never been part of our bedtime routine - it gets them het up rather than calming them down. Their hair is washed once a week in term time after swimming class (v long hair as per DC's request, which takes an age to wash and dry). On holidays we once went 3 weeks without washing their hair. Hair was not smelly and looked lovely throughout.
My DC is not smelly, not dirty and most definitely not neglected! They have clean clothes, tidy brushed hair, are very popular at school, and have a generally nice life. (They also have a miraculous ability to somehow stay clean even when eating bowls of bolognaise and poking around in the dirt at school, which is helpful 🙏. Obviously if/when they do actually get covered in mud I wash them!).

I did some poking around and the American Academy of Dermatology say that children below pre-teens do not need more than 1-2 baths a week as long as they're not actively dirty/smelly.
https://www.aad.org/public/everyday-care/skin-care-basics/care/child-bathing

So is it really that bad not to bathe your children very often?

YABU - Children are dirty and sticky, more washing please!

YANBU - As long as they're not stinking up the bus then it's fine.

I don't see why the bar has to be so low - like oh we did that in the 50s so once a week is fine.
Kids may not be sweaty like adults but they get sticky, grubby, and they piss and shit like the rest of us. Why would you not want to wash them? And people who think their kids are clean should probably have a look at some of the grotty grey shirt cuffs in an average classroom.
We are fortunate to live in a country where we have indoor plumbing and hot water.
My son had eczema as a baby and I'm very familiar with managing it. Bathing or not made no difference and I preferred to have a clean baby.

If they've had sun lotion on them they definitely need a wash x

Agree with this. My little one has enjoyed massaging food into her scalp from weaning. No amount of wiping and washing quite does the job like a bath. She also loves swimming, soft play and rolling in grass/mud so I just don’t understand how I could go that long tbh.

Also I would hate only bathing once a week. That’s a big part of it for me. I’d feel so grubby even with three a week.

My kid has a bath once a week unless it's really hot weather or they've been doing a lot of physical exercise. My teen has a shower twice a week. It's not neglect at all. People need to wind their necks in.

Right!

My grandmother had an indoor bathroom that was unused, but we still washed twice a day. She used to have us set a pan outside in the sun to warm the water, and you’d have your evening bath before sun down so it’s not too cold, or you warm the water and bathe.

Same at home. No one was getting into my parents’ bed unwashed - neither baby nor teenager.

No of course not.

Kids they young do not get smelly.

Its only as they get older and their bodies to start smelling that you should bath them more regularly.

We know that over washing is more harmful than under washing, especially for young children.

It’s different if they get dirty, wet, cold or went swimming.
But it’s not neglectful to only bath young kids once a week.

I’d also add that as a teacher I regularly smell dirty hair when a child is sitting close by eg in assembly. So I’m not surprised by the percentage who think bathing weekly is fine. And I absolutely agree that teens need a shower or bath daily. Nicknames stick and in the spring and summer particularly some of them really smell of stale BO by the afternoon, even if they showered in the morning. I was a sweaty and smelly teenager despite not being particularly active (always had a PE note!), bathing daily and having a parent who encouraged me to use a good deodorant.

Tried it as a disabled person?

Presume you had a bath with running water then and not the tin one in the kitchen

A bath is not 'minimal effort' when you have a 4 year old with dystonia, no trunk control and involuntary movements, a child who needs hoisting into and out of the bath to be safe, needs specialist seating in the bath because they are unable to sit without support. A child who cannot walk or even hold their head up. We have no space for a hoist in our bathroom and are waiting to move to a house where we can safely bath him, safely get him in and out of the water, a home where he can enjoy a bath that often relieves him of the pain of his dystonia. The fact that he doesn't get daily baths doesn't make him unclean or smelly, he is loved and cared for to the very best of my ability with the resources we've got including daily bed bathing, clean clothes, clean bed linen at least every other day and a clean home.

Exactly - a face, hands and ‘bits’ wash is fine between baths. And for small children, wet wipes are good for their bits.

Oh dear.

If your teen is male do they spray a whole can of Lynx on themselves?

You really need to tell them to shower daily.

Unless they are washing their pits daily and their genitals, they will pong.

Secondary schools stink of unwashed bodies and boys' schools are the very worst.

I recall parents' evening at my son's school and the classrooms and stairwells just stank of sweat.

Although I’m old I read MN a lot.
How refreshing to read that there are so many young mums not obsessed by showering and bathing. We have skin for a reason, to protect us. That skin has to be nurtured. Not have the living daylights washed out of it every day.
The same with hair. Have a look around you and notice how many young people have thin hair.
If your parents have any photos of your grandparents look at the lovely hair they had: why is that? No 1, shampoos were gentle. No2 they didn’t wash it every single day, ie, not washing out all that nature had provided to keep it growing and healthy.

No the tin bath was when I was much younger

What's wrong with flannels?!
I use one daily for my face I think people have memories of stinky unwashed ones but they can be washed

does no one go camping/to festivals/trekking when you could go for days without a bath or shower..?

I mean obviously I generally have one every day at home when it's available , but I don't feel like it's the end of the world (no one dies, or is overcome with the smell) if very occassionally I have a day without a shower!

a bath is minimal effort and it’s lazy not to do it.

I wish we'd had the financial privilege to run hot water all day, every day. Would have been a lot more pleasant than going to bed in a beanie because we needed to save money on the central heating.

It's not neglect but I couldn't only give my children a bath once or twice a week (and wouldn't let them go 3 weeks without washing their hair). DS has bath every night and hair wash once a week. Teenagers shower every day. DH and I also shower daily.
You probably don't need to have a shower /bath every night but I would say every other day at least.

There's a huge difference between a child who only has a weekly bath but who gets their face washed daily, has clean clothes, clean bedsheets and gets their hair and teeth brushed daily, and a child who is only allowed one bath a week, has dirty clothes and never brushes their teeth

This.

Children aren't self-cleaning, also many girls start puberty younger these days, so by 8 upwards they do need more attention on daily washing, whether with a flannel and water or in a quick shower.

The suggestion of neglect riles me. Actually bathing dc every night is over-kill because it's not that great for their skin.

Babies also drop food down them when weaning, get sweaty, and so on. Again, soap and flannel, all fine, but this idea we used to have one dip a week and nothing in between is wrong. My grandma and grandpa would have been mortified, we all had strip washes every day.

Some people are in denial about how much they or their children smell, I don't bathe every day but I do wash every day and if you don't wash hair every few days, it's smells. I remember the 70's and I remember some people ponged! Those with hair that was greasy easily looked terrible. We used to have a family friend over and have to do mouth breathing when she was present. I think people honestly don't remember how much people smelt then and how much standards around this have changed.

Don't bathe more than once a week then, but buy flannels and wash the poor blighters! And all pre-teens and teens also need a daily wash of their bits and pits, as do all adults.

Wish people would shut up about what they did in the 70s.

Maybe we should bring back teachers hitting children and smoking indoors while we're at it. Because if it's what you did then then it should be perfectly normal by today's standards.

Calm down. Bathing once a week is nothing like hitting children 😬

You don’t need to fill the bathtub to the top and have a long, leisurely, spa-like bath session. Just fill it a quarter or a third of the way up. Similarly, a shower doesn’t need to be longer than 2 or 3 minutes if you can’t afford it. Get one of those egg timer thingies from the pound store and time it. Simple. There is no justification or excuse for not having good personal hygiene.

I don't think it's neglect as long as kids are clean and not smelling.
My two have a bath every second night, but only once a week do I wash their hair (unless there's a need to do it outwith that like putting their ice cream bowl on their head once they're done...)