Keeping your body hygienic

While not all children will be able to manage their hygiene and personal care completely independently, it is important to provide your child with as much choice and control over their personal care as possible. This can include:

• asking your child for their consent before assisting them with personal care activities. This helps to reinforce that all people need to ask for consent before touching another person. See Consent and Personal Care for more information
• providing as much privacy as possible during personal care activities. This can involve closing the bathroom/toilet door or closing the shower curtain for the parts of personal care that you do not need to assist with
• building your child’s skills to do as much of their personal care as they can. This could be smaller tasks or bigger tasks, depending on your child’s capacity. For example, holding the wash cloth while you guide their hand, or lifting their arms up while you take their shirt off.
• giving your child the opportunities to make choices. For example, they could choose their preferred scent of body wash and deodorant, or their preferred colour of wash cloth

Not all children are enthusiastic and willing participants in their personal care and hygiene routines. Some children really dislike personal care activities. Showering in particular can be a big challenge. When this happens it can be helpful to think about things that might motivate your child to shower more often.

This can include:

• social motivation: explaining that not showering regularly can make you smelly. Other people might not like the way you smell and may not want to play or hang out with you.
• reward based motivation: for some children with disability the social reasons for showering may not be very motivating. In this case, creating a reward choices board may be a good option. To do this, you can:
  • work with your child to make a picture board of small rewards like treats or favourite activities.
  • ask them to pick a reward off the board that they would like when they have finished showering
  • give them praise and the reward straight away once they have finished showering. It can take some time for your child to start associating showering with the reward, so give them a week or two to adjust to this new program. This method can be used to help teach other behaviours not just showering.