I don't know whether this is a good habit or not for my baby. But my wife is always taking our baby a bath using warm water.So when the time we would to take our baby to swim in the pool, our baby were shocked and crying. We thought that this is happened because the water in the pool is cold. Is there any recommendations that we have to use warm water for bathing a baby? If yes, when is exactly the right time to use normal temperature water for bathing a baby? For your information, our baby is 6 months old right now.
1 Answer
The recommendation I got from the midwives in 2009 was that the water needs to be body-temperature. Use a bath thermometer to check this, because it should never be warmer than that. This applies to infants in particular. This becomes less of an issue as the child grows, but you should certainly be careful in the first year.
Yes, this means that if you throw an infant into the ocean anywhere in the world, the infant is going to freeze! The same is true for a public bath. The solution here consists of two steps: First, choose a location where the water is as warm as possible (some public baths have small baby pools where the water is a lot warmer than the regular pools). Second, only be in the water a short time, maybe no more than 5 minutes(!), then dry the child and warm up again.
I've mentioned earlier that the reason is that infants have very small bodies, so temperature differences are more significant to them than to older kids or adults. They can't handle "too cold" or "too hot" the way we can.