Back to Homepage
Hi, I’m Dr. Bari Cunningham, board certified dermatologist and pediatric dermatologist. I practice in Encinitas, California at Comprehensive Dermatology Group. I’ve been doing pediatric dermatology for over 20 years, and there’s three things that parents always get wrong about eczema and their children. Number one, bathing. I can’t tell you how many times people come in and say they’re bathing their child once a week or twice a week, at most three times a week. When in reality, eczema improves with daily bathing. The important thing is how you bathe the baby. So the worst thing to do is put the baby in bubble bath, to use a bunch of harsh soaps, to let the child run around and air-dry, and to put them in scratchy polyester pajamas. In reality, what you want to do is bathe the child in a short bath with lukewarm water, have them come out, pat their skin so that there’re still beads of water on their skin, and then apply a bland ceramide based moisturizer. If you do that every night and put them in cotton pajamas and put them to bed, their skin will improve, not worsen. So it’s really important that you realize it’s important to daily bathe your children, but also to not put them in the wrong environmental conditions. You should not be using bubble bath. You should not be using harsh soaps. You should not be using non cotton pajamas.
