A mother of five has sparked a discussion online after admitting that she sends her children to school without bathing them every day, insisting that it “won’t harm them.”
Australian blogger Constance Hall explained that taking care of a large family requires her to make compromises, and giving her kids a daily bath isn’t one of her priorities. To save time, she skips their baths on certain days, which she believes is completely fine.
Hall shared that her five biological children and two stepchildren sometimes go to school with a bit of an odor, but it doesn’t bother her. To make mornings less stressful, she also allows her kids to eat with their hands to avoid washing dishes, and she wears headphones at home to block out their noise.
Constance Hall said it’s fine for her kids to go to school being “smelly”
“They don’t have to bathe or shower every day. They can often skip that part of the routine if it’s making everyone stressed. I’m like, ‘Fine, go to school smelly and let everyone deal with it’,” Constance said in a post on Mama Mia back in 2019.
She added, “I honestly can’t be bothered bathing everyone every night,” and backed up her choice by referencing advice from the American Academy of Dermatology, which says that kids aged six to 11 only need to bathe once or twice a week unless they are dirty, sweaty, or have a skin issue.
“I know they look cuter when they’re clean and smell fresh, but honestly, missing a night bath or morning shower a couple of times a week isn’t going to hurt them,” she explained.
Speaking about mealtimes at home, she added, “Eat with your hands. Washing dishes is the worst part of dinner. In other cultures, people eat with their hands from a shared plate.”
She continued, “Eating should be one of the enjoyable moments you share with your kids, not a blur of angry memories. So if they don’t eat their dinner, don’t stress. Try something different, keep trying, or just let them have plain pasta and tomato sauce. None of my kids ate anything healthy before age seven, but now they all eat well and are perfectly healthy.”
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Other parenting tips she shared include having picnics, using color-coded bins to “toss” each child’s clothes into, setting aside “check-out” time for relaxation, and wearing headphones to block out the noise from her kids.
She said, “I can’t answer 400 questions a day from six different kids: the arguments over whose turn it is on the iPad, or who broke what. I just can’t. So I block it out.”
