5 Years Old and Need To Be Pinned to Get Clean

It has been a long time since I washed a kid. I remember the ritual of it. The bath water had to be the right temperature before my kids would agree to get in. My kids liked the bubbles and lot of their favourite toys in the bath with them. They played with the toys and I washed the kids, and occasionally I would have to take a toy out of their hands if it got in the way of the washing. I honestly cannot remember a time when I had to pin them down to clean them and certainly not when they were 5 years old, when the child is getting to the age where they can bathe themselves. I remember my son was obsessed with not getting shampoo in his eyes, and so if he did not get rinsed almost immediately after a shampooing, he would get upset.

When I had to pin a kid was mainly when they were very little. I remember those occasions vividly.

1. Trimming my son’s fingernails in the first 18 months. Baby fingernails are just like little razor blades and if they are not trimmed, they can slice you up. My son hated it and fought it tooth and nail (so to speak). There was no distracting him with toys or any kind of trick like that which worked. We tried them all, and ultimately it boiled down to daddy pinning the baby, while mommy trimmed the nails. It was amazing to me how strong a baby can be when they are fighting something with every ounce of strength they have.
2. Changing my daughter’s diaper. Babies’ back muscles can be quite strong. My daughter loved to arch her back on the changing table, making it virtually impossible to change her diaper because her little bottom would be flying about in the air. My wife did not have the strength to do it, and so I often had to put my muscles to work to unarch that back and get the diaper on as quickly as possible before the exposure to open air caused other things to happen.
3. My daughter in the first 18 months hated car seats and screamed throughout the course of any ride where she had to be in one, no matter how many times we adjusted the straps. She did not like being held down, like car seats do. My wife and I started to do anything we could do to avoid traveling with her in the car.

Eventually my kids grew out of those stages; but in today's For Better or For Worse we have Elly Patterson scrubbing at her son like she was giving a dog a bath. The part I find interesting is that Michael’s complaints have less to do with the idea of being clean and more to do with Elly’s techniques. His comment about water in his ears, for example, doesn’t say he prefers his ears to be dirty, but doesn’t like water in his ears. This a stark contrast to a boyhood character getting a bath like Dennis the Menace or a Tom Sawyer, where the idea of a bath almost always led to something like having to dress up in uncomfortable clothes or go to church, which was their main area of complaint.

Another point from my real life. My daughter prefers me to brush her hair. My wife does it the brutal way, where she drags the brush through the tangles and pulls them out by brute force. I always hated that when I was a kid, so when I brush her hair, I try to work the tangles out without having to pull her hair away from her scalp to do it. It takes longer, but my daughter likes it a lot better.

Like my wife, who prefers her method of brushing for its speed, Elly Patterson ignores Mike’s protests about how she washes him and continues on under the premise that she has to do it that way because he is dirty and she is unwilling to consider an alternative. This is pretty typical of Elly, whom we will later see has only one way to load a dishwasher and one way to fold laundry. She even stuck by her sheet-shaving when Mike, Dee and Elizabeth mocked her for doing it.

Hey, Elly! You don’t have to be brutal to scrub a kid. I used to simply say things like, “Let me see your arm” to my kids just before I washed their arms. If your kid is crying out in pain at age 5 when you wash him, then maybe it's not that he is a whiner, but he really is in pain.