Some kids love to take baths. But with other kids, some parents feel like they’re asking their kids to open wide to have teeth pulled out. What can you do, as a parent, to get kids to take a bath?

Before I give you a few solutions, I thought it would be fun to share some of the moments that made my wife and I laugh over the last couple of years. My personal favorite is when our two daughters were taking a bath together. Our older daughter said to the youngest, “Sweetie, don’t drink the water because I peed in the bath”. We were both just about rolling on the floor when that came out of her mouth. Another time, when my daughter was about 3, I was taking a bath with her while my wife was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. My daughter looked at my wife and said, “Mommy, did you know that Daddy has a tail?” I think the neighbors must have heard us laughing at that one.

When we give our kids baths in our home, it has been programmed in their minds that bath time is fun. We laugh. We sing. We play with toys. We talk about anything. Both of our kids love taking baths because they see it as a really good time. I think that this is the key to making sure your kids are willing participants when it comes to getting squeaky clean.

Here are a few tips to get you going in this direction:

• Let your child sit in the bathroom while you take a bath. Put a few bath toys in the bath and play with them yourself. It seems weird but you might just get your child interested enough to want to join you.
• Get in the tub with your kids! In the toddler years this is a normal and healthy thing to do. Splash around with your kids and take turns dumping water on each other. Laugh about it.
• Get your child to pick a favorite toy to bring into the bath. In a really difficult situation have the child actually pick the toy out at the store him or herself, but only allow the child to play with this toy in the bath.
• Sing songs in the bath together.
• Give your child a straw to blow bubbles in the water with. This simple “toy” seems to really give kids a ton of pleasure. Just make sure they aren’t using it to drink the bath water!
• Last but not least, use the language tools that I teach in the “Talking to Toddlers” audio course. Presuppositions, double binds, yes sets and reframing techniques are just a few of the tools you’ll learn in this program. They are designed to get your toddlers to agree with your requests without resistance. They really do work!

Whatever you choose to do, make sure that you understand this one simple thing – getting your kids to take a bath is best accomplished by making it fun for the child. Every child is different, so find something that works for your child. Whatever you do, remember to be flexible and try new things.

Enjoy your children,
Chris Thompson

Hey, I'm Chris Thompson. I help stressed-out parents deal with toddlers. Grab the free lesson I've prepared for you. You'll love it. Email:

Lots of parents wonder how to get their kids to transition from a crib to a toddler bed. It usually happens around the age of two, but sometimes a bit later.

I’m going to provide a series of tips to help you get your toddler adjusted to a bed rather than a crib. But before I do, let’s talk about why your toddler might resist this transition. It’s pretty simple. People tend to resist change. Once we are comfortable with something the way it is, we don’t like to change it. Toddler behavior tends to align with this basic rule of life.

Change will be accepted by a person when:

1. The new action / behavior is clearly superior;
2. The old behavior / action is unavailable and the new one is the best available option;
3. Change is forced upon them until it becomes a new habit.

Obviously option #1 is the best approach to use with children because it creates no disruption. It’s like offering a child a chocolate cookie for dessert instead of a stick of celery. They will go for it instantly with no hesitation. To get a toddler into a toddler bed, your goal should be to associate lots of positive attributes to the bed.

In the case of switching to a toddler bed, Options 2 and 3 on the above list are essentially the same. You are taking away choice (i.e. you are taking away the crib) and the next best solution is the toddler bed. Specifically, you are taking away the crib without getting agreement from your child. This can cause your child to be upset, but eventually he or she will get over it and the toddler bed becomes a new pattern.

So how can parents get toddlers to willingly switch to a toddler bed? Here are a bunch of ideas for you to try out:

• Go shopping with your toddler. If you can get him to pick out his own bed, chances are that he will pick something he likes (people rarely pick stuff that they hate, right?). This will immediately boost your chances of getting your toddler to actually enjoy sleeping in the toddler bed.
• Setup the toddler bed in your child’s room. Leave it there for a week or more before you take away the crib. If space is an issue, maybe this isn’t something you can do, but if you put the bed there, the child will start to see it as normal. Just introduce it as another piece of furniture and perhaps don’t even mention that you’ll be taking the crib away. If you get huge resistance and are unable to get your child to willingly change to the new bed, you may just have to remove the crib by surprise.
• Play quiet games on the new bed with your toddler. Those toddler wooden puzzles and shape matching games are great things to do on the new bed together. Read books together. Snuggle together and tickle your toddler into laughter. This will ‘anchor’ positive feelings to the new bed very quickly. Anchoring is something I teach in my Talking to Toddlers Audio Course, which all parents should consider for dealing with difficult toddlers.
• Actually tell your toddler that they have a choice as to where they will sleep at night (or at nap time). Then make the bed appealing by offering a “big boy/girl pillow” for when they are in the new bed. Or simply create a reward scenario where the toddler gets stickers for having a nap in the new bed. At this point it should be offered as a choice, not a forced issue. You want to get your toddler to decide, on his or her own, to sleep in this new bed.

If these tricks still don’t work, then you have to resort to taking away the option of a crib altogether. But remember – you don’t need to rush this! You might bring on a screaming fit if your child suddenly finds his crib gone, and a toddler bed in its place. That’s why I think introducing the bed by the crib side makes for an easier transition.

When and if you have to take away the crib, I highly recommend the “it’s broken” excuse. With our first daughter, we were not only moving her into a big girl bed, but also into a new bedroom! We told her the crib was broken. We took the mattress out and put it on the floor of her new room beside her new bed. We let her choose where to sleep. She picked the mattress on the floor, but was curious about the new bed. We let her play on the new bed and lie down on it if she felt like it. We read books together on the new bed. Whenever she asked about her crib we told her it was broken. No arguments.

Within 2 weeks she was sleeping in her new bed. The clincher was this: we took her to the pet store and showed her all of the fish. We bought a small aquarium kit with some pretty (but cheap) tropical fish. We placed the aquarium on her dresser, which could only be seen if she lied in her new bed, not from the mattress on the floor. We cuddled on the new bed at night with the aquarium light on. She loved watching the fish as she fell asleep. It worked perfectly.

If you want to be able to understand how to solve these kinds of problems, check out the Talking To Toddlers Audio Course.

Enjoy your children,
Chris Thompson

I’m writing this post during the week between Christmas and New Years, with no access to the Internet, so it will be published when I get home. Every year at this time, our family goes up north to my in-law’s cottage on a small lake. It’s a really great cottage to vacation at, and I’m lucky to have such great in-laws who share this little slice of heaven with us pretty much as often as we like.

You know those days when the weather is really crappy and you feel “stuck in the house” and totally bored? Your kids get in a bad mood, and the whole family just interacts poorly? Imagine being up here at the cottage and doing that for a week solid. It would drive you totally nuts. So how do you prevent it? It’s easy … get outside a lot! I mean ever single day, hopefully twice per day, for at least an hour at a time.

When we go outside we do all kinds of things. If the weather has been cold enough for long enough, then the lake is safe to walk on and we can walk all around the lake. Sometimes we’ll just pull the kids in a sled. We can also build snow forts and tunnels of all kinds … the time just flies by when we are building things in the snow. And then there’s the trips out to the wood pile to gather firewood to keep the cottage warm. But my favorite part has to be taking the kids over to one of the cottage roads, which becomes a sledding hill when it’s covered in snow. What makes these activities fun is that I get to pretend I’m a kid again. My first responsibility is to take care of my kids and make sure they are safe, but beyond that I like to dig tunnels, go sledding and slide on the frozen lake.

When we play outside, we are all happy. If we dress appropriately we stay very warm. We get a ton of fresh air and we all feel great. We’re all getting plenty of exercise too, which is a lot better than parking our lazy butts in front of the TV all day.

We can’t get outside every day. For example, this week we actually had two solid days of rain. The first day it was more of a mist and we could go outside for only 20 minutes before getting too wet. But the second day it literally poured for hours. That was an inside day. The kids got cranky and so did the parents (yup, nobody is perfect). We ended up playing indoor games and making crafts, which was fine, but for a while we were all just miserable.

The whole point of this post is to provide some perspective on keeping healthy and happy. My opinion is that by getting outside and playing with your kids, you’ll benefit from health and happiness. Those are two priceless “features” that any parent can add to their own life by acting like a kid again, in the presence of your own kids. Try it. It’s also worth noting that to play outside has a price tag of zero. Last time I checked the world was in a major recession (some say depression) … so cheap is good.

If you have a hard time convincing your kids to get outside in the winter weather, I can recommend a great audio course for parenting toddlers that will teach you some fantastic language tools to help influence them. But I’m a bit biased since I wrote the course.

Enjoy your children,
Chris Thompson