I asked Twitter to send me their burning parenting questions, and I received a lot of great queries.  I have so many that this deserves to be a recurring segment.  You can find all them here as they pop up.  If you want to ask a question that I’ll answer on this site, please email me or contact me via Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

While I am a doctor in real life, on the internet I provide this information for entertainment purposes only.

Today’s question came courtesy of @DrWestern:

“How often should pre-pubescent boys bathe? And does swimming in a pool count? (It totally does, right?)”

I Love Showers

On a random family vacation in some nondescript hotel in some city I cannot recall, around the age of 7ish, I learned I love showers.  Up until then I only took baths as a child, but I was forced to take a shower because some aspect of the tub didn’t work.

There was no going back — I’ve been shower obsessed ever since then.  My parents, my college/med school roomates, and my wife, will attest to the fact that I routinely take unnecessarily long showers.

Unnecessary in that I don’t need that long to clean myself.  At some point I adopted the practice of shaving my face in the shower, which adds a couple minutes, but allows me a comfortably clean and closer shave than I can do at the sink.  As I shave 6-7 days/week, a habit I started in medical school, it makes a difference.

However some of the time is just relaxation — more important than the shampoo or the shaving is the routine.  Other people drink cups of coffee or have a certain meal to ready themselves for the day.  I take a shower.  It resets my mind, calms me, and helps me feel prepared for whatever is next, whether that’s a long workday or a long parenting day.

The shower is not necessary to fully clean every day.  Many people, including my wife, don’t use shampoo and conditioner every day.  Many people do not use soap/body wash every day.

Why?  Because as adults they’ve learned that they don’t need to “clean” and scrub every part of the body the day, because it can have deleterious effects.  They dry your skin, they irritate, etc.

Yet there are plenty of families that still try to have young children take a bath every day.  Turns out that it is not necessary.

PigPen Lives Here

Part of the issue is that we often think of children as PigPen, the character from Charlie Brown.  Always covered in dirt and grime and unseen bacteria.

As a house with three boys, ranging from 2 to 9 years old, we have plenty of experience in dirty children.  The older two love to play outdoors together, they participate in sports and activities that make them sweat.

The oldest, Rogue One, is outside at school running around during recess and P.E. almost every day.  We have a tiny little sandbox in back where the youngest one can cover himself, and occasionally ingest, sand that has been exposed to the elements.

So they have plenty of opportunity to cover themselves in sweat and grime, and we have plenty of reason to want to hose them down.

How often do they need to bathe?

Let’s Turn to the Experts

I spend part of my “day” job working on clinical research.  When I have a question I want to answer, not only do I participate and lead research programs to try to answer some of them, I have had to learn to search the existing reserach literature to see what has already been answered.

I conducted a thorough literature search, trying to identify research studies and reviews that answered the question “how often should children bathe?”

After a thorough examination of multiple sources, I found nothing.  Though I did learn that in some patients with epilepsy, bathing can trigger a seizure, but as a reminder, while I am a doctor, I am not your doctor.  All information presented here is for entertainment purposes only.

So I decided to do what all my patients do.  I googled it.

Dr. Google

The American Academy of Pediatrics provides a short overview discussing bathing and babies, giving you permission to not bathe your infant daily, instead just keeping the private parts clean.

Frequent bathing dries out their skin, which is already more fragile than adult skin.  Dry skin will make it easier to develop eczema, get a skin infection, and just generally feel icky.  It’s also unnecessary, as it’s pretty hard for a baby to get really dirty.

The American Academy of Dermatology says for 6-11 year olds you can bathe a couple times a week.  If they’re visibly dirty, go ahead and hose them down.  Just because they spent 30 minutes running around chasing the dog does not mean they require a bath.

Once they hit puberty?  All bets are off.  Set up a decon station by the front door and hose them down with a high pressure device.  No, don’t pour this on them.

The Rogue Kids

Before today I had not read these recommendations, but it’s roughly in line with what we do.

If one of them has a vigorous activity/sport for >1 hour, they usually get a bath or a shower.  Rogue Two, age 5, has discovered he loves them, and appears to be on my trajectory of overusing the shower.

If the toddler is visibly dirty, we often just wipe down the affected parts with baby wipes and use some soap on his hands.  He enjoys bath time, but it only happens 2-3x/week.

One major consideration is life — I work full-time and my wife works part-time.  She often is not home until evening, and my schedule is all over the place.  Cleaning up 3 kids on your own is time consuming and not something we want to do every day.

Thankfully, Rogue One one is old enough to do everything on his own.  Rogue Two is old enough to do everything but turn the water on to the right temp and turn it off (though he sometimes does a “double bath” with one of his brothers).

They both need reminders (and sometimes help) applying lotion afterwards — something I recommend for all your children — but they are pretty much self-sufficient.

None of our boys have hit puberty, but you can bet when all three of them are there we’ll have one of these hazmat pools sitting outside our front door.