Why My ADHD Son's Showers Take Forever (It's Not About Being Clean)
Jack explained his own shower to me the other night, unprompted, like he’d been sitting on the theory for a while and finally wanted to say it out loud. “It’s not really one thing, Mom. It’s three things.” I asked what he meant, and he laid it out better than any parenting article I’ve read.
“It’s such a pain to take a shower. I have to stop what I’m doing, and I know I’m going to be cold and wet. And then when I’m in it, it’s pretty great. My brain feels quiet. And getting out the cold and wet start all over again, and on top of that, I have to get dressed.”
Getting in is a pile of annoying decisions, being in is the best part of his day, and getting out is a string of things he hates. Which explains both why the whole thing takes forever and why I could never get a straight answer out of him about it.
The getting-in part made immediate sense to me – I’ve watched it happen. Undress, figure out if the towel’s actually where it’s supposed to be, get the water to the right temperature (never on the first try), make himself step in. None of that is about hygiene. It’s just a chain of small decisions, back to back, for a task that doesn’t reward him for doing it quickly. I’ve seen the same stall-out before school, before homework, before pretty much anything that isn’t already fun. It’s never been about him not caring. It’s that starting is its own separate skill, and it’s the one that’s hardest for his brain specifically.
The part I didn’t expect was the middle. He told me the water genuinely feels good enough that he stops tracking how long he’s been in there – not in a sneaky, avoiding-me way, in a-lost-track way. He’ll think two minutes have passed and it’s been twenty. I used to read that as stalling, or ignoring me when I’d call up the stairs. It isn’t. It’s the same time blindness that happens to him with a video game or a good book. Something about his brain, when it’s enjoying something, just stops registering time the normal way. The shower is one of the only parts of his day that’s purely, physically soothing, with nothing else demanding his attention, and it turns out that’s exactly the condition under which he loses time the hardest. My brain feels quiet. That’s the part of what he said I keep coming back to. I used to be annoyed by the twenty-minute showers. Now I mostly just understand them.
And then getting out is its own wall, for reasons that have nothing to do with the first two. Cold air on wet skin, hair that won’t cooperate, the whole business of getting dressed again. He said it flatly, like it wasn’t up for debate: “getting out is worse than getting in.” I believe him. It explains something I never had language for before, which is that he’ll sometimes stay in the shower well past the point of washing anything, not because he’s avoiding getting clean, but because he’s avoiding what comes right after.
What’s changed for us isn’t a system, exactly. It’s that I stopped treating the length of his showers as defiance. I give him a heads-up before I need the bathroom back, instead of assuming he heard the first one. I stopped being surprised that “I’ll be right out” and twenty actual minutes don’t match up in his head, because for him, in that moment, they don’t. It’s a small shift, but it’s the difference between a nightly argument and just… a kid who takes long showers, for reasons that finally make sense to both of us.
Dysregulation and stalled-out transitions don’t stay this small forever, either: here’s what it looks like when the same kind of thing shows up in teenagers.
Names and identifying details in this post have been changed to protect my kids’ privacy. “Annie Hart” is a pen name for the same reason.