Daddy Days: The bathroom amusement park

I’m pretty sure there’s a massive business opportunity for a bathroom-themed water park. Every boy aged 2 to 7 would be begging to go. After all, young boys think the bathroom is an amusement park.

Just look how they treat bathrooms that are not designed to be a water park. The bathtub is a wave pool. The faucet is a sprinkler/splash pad. The wet floor is a slide. The soap dispenser is a squirt gun. And from what I can tell, the toilet paper is what they use for a towel.

The idea of kids being interested in using items improperly isn’t anything new. From the youngest ages they want to get their hands on anything that’s not a toy. I’m convinced you could have a room full of brightly painted toys on one side, and a simple TV remote on the other side and every crawling baby is going after that remote.

Kids want to play with items that aren’t toys (remotes, cell phones, appliance plugs, etc.) and they are inclined to approach the bathroom as a play area. Maybe they’re on to something adults don’t notice in our ultra-luxurious society. We’re so accustomed to water coming out of an interior faucet on command, we don’t realize how incredible this is in the history of civilization.

Kids see access to water inside the house and know: this is an opportunity. After all, to kids, water means play.

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I’m telling you, there’s a business opportunity here. A bathroom-themed amusement park for kids could get away with the most ridiculous names for its rides and attractions. You’d have the Flusher, the Soap Slides, and the Boomerang Bubble Bath. The Toilet Twister, Shower Chute, Tub Tubes … the list could go on.

If nothing else, it could help weaken the incredible powerful appeal of playing in the bathroom. Sliding on the wet and soapy bathroom floor would be less fun once you’d slid down a 200-foot soap slide at an amusement park.

I suppose this is all a pipe dream (that’s a good name for a tube slide right there, the Pipe Dream). With all the general water parks and amusement parks out there already, I guess there’s little chance someone is going to go all-in on the lavatory theme. And it’s not like it would really stop the boys from goofing around in the bathroom anyway. It’s just too tempting of an environment.

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And, in that backward kid thinking way, a big part of the fun is surely that the bathroom is not an amusement park. They get a kick out of messing around with soap and with the water precisely because they’re not supposed to. Which means they’ll continue to treat the bathroom like an amusement park, and the real business opportunity is a kid-proof bathroom.

Harris and his wife live in Pflugerville with their seven children. Please email comments or suggestions for future columns to thoughtsforcaleb@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Daddy Days: The bathroom amusement park