One of the fears that she developed was a fear of the bathtub. Now, knowing my daughter, she has always loved playing in water. Loves the tub, loves the pool, loves anything that involves water play. Even as an infant, she loved getting baths.
Out of nowhere she started to act terrified to get into the tub. She would cover her eyes and scream bloody murder. Her whole body would shake and she would beg to be let out. After the first three times that this happened, I would quickly wash her up and get her out as fast as possible and I worried that something had happened to traumatize her from wanting to take a bath. That's when I started to do some research and learned that fears in toddlers are extremely normal.
They are very, very real and it's sad to see these little ones so terrified of something. Some tips that I tried to help her fear of the bathtub were: taking a bath with her, letting her sit outside and play with the water from the outside (which she wanted nothing to do with), letting her wear her bathing suit into the tub and pretending like it was a pool, but none of these worked. All of this advice came from Dr. Sears. Anytime I have any sort of parenting advice, I look in one of my huge Dr. Sears books that sit next to my bed. In my opinion, the Sears' family is genius! They have wonderful ways of parenting and explain the reasoning behind a child's actions. They explained that these fears that toddlers develop are extremely real and should not be ignored. They stressed that we should not force her to do something that she does not want to do, but wait and try again later. So from that point on, we starting taking showers with her and didn't even mention the bathtub for almost a whole month. After about 4 weeks, we decided to reintroduce the bathtub. One of the other things they suggested when reintroducing the tub were to buy new play toys for in the tub or try adding bubbles. Well, as it turns out, the bubbles did the trick!
She's played with bubbles in the bath before, but not on a regular basis. This time, we added TONS of bubbles to make it extra appealing to her and she loved every second of it. Now when it's bath time we call it a bubble bath because she always gets bubbles and if that's what helps her, then I am all for bubbles!
Some other fears that she currently has is: the wind, the peacock in my parent's backyard, the ice cream truck. We have found that it is helpful to not draw attention to these fears when she acts scared. Instead, we try to change the subject and talk about something different. I do not try and make her face these fears head on. She is way to little for that and I try to put it into my perspective as well. I am extremely terrified of snakes...to the point that if I saw one I would definitely scream, run and cry. In fact, I don't even like hearing people tell me stories about snakes because it gives me chills. I have nightmares about snakes at least once a month and they are very real to me. I wake up in a panic and, to me, they feel real. You couldn't pay me a million dollars to touch one. It just wouldn't happen. I don't even want to see one from a distance or I would cry. So if that is how Riley feels about the peacock in my parent's backyard, then there is no way I am going to make her go look at it or come close to it. These fears will eventually fade, but some may also remain.
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