DS (21 months) hates getting his hands dirty.
It started a few months ago when the CM did messy play with him - a couple of bowls of "gloop" (water and cornflour). she rang me because he wouldn't stop crying and she couldn't figure out if he'd hurt himself or what was wrong. When his hands were clean again he calmed down.
The same happened again a couple of days later while painting.
then he started doing it with messy foods (stuff with sauce etc), and now it has got completely out of control and he won't even hold a bit of cheese because it leaves a tiny bit of grease on his fingers, or have a bath without screaming and drying his hands off every few seconds.
From the very beginning me and my husband have been trying different approaches - reassuring him it's ok, and putting some of whatever he was having a problem with on ourselves to show him that, showing him how to clean it off himself (licking his fingers resulted in a meltdown because of wet fingers), ignoring it (bad, bad idea), wiping it and reassuring him at the same time, and wiping it while not giving it too much attention at all. it's getting worse, to the extent where everything becomes difficult..
(he had HF&M recently and kept crying at the blisters because he thought they were dirt and kept wanting to clean them up)
I spoke to my HV on wednesday, and she just sat there, nodded and smiled until I wanted to smack her stupid grin then said "maybe he's manipulating you, he'll grow out of it" and said to just keep cleaning his hands.
I actually have a friend with a DS who is 3.6yrs and he started doing something similar at DS's age and is STILL doing it, so not reassuring.
I am reaching the end of my tether with this, really don't know what to do about it anymore, and the person I went to for advice turend out to be more than useless.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this?