A survey I received recently suggests that parents find bedtime to be the most stressful part of the day. The raw evidence behind most commercially commissioned surveys – this one was from a blinds company – are often weak, and this is no exception. Yet the results chimed with my own experience quite strongly.
Mealtimes and waking-up times are no picnic either, along with the times in between, but bedtime does present its own special set of problems, mainly because getting a child to sleep is fundamentally out of our control, and parents hate feeling helpless. Which is a shame, because that is fundamentally the condition of parents, as it is of children.
I am aware of a number of strategies one can follow to ensure a smooth passage into the arms of Morpheus – though not all of these are particularly realistic. One is to make sure the bedroom is used primarily for sleep rather than for play or work activities – so that the brain recognises the bed as a place of slumber rather than activity – but this strikes me as being largely unenforceable. What are you going to do, lock up the toys? Unless you can afford a dedicated playroom, it’s just not going to happen.
Another idea is to make sure the room is dark, particularly in summer when the daylight can persist long enough to make the child believe they are being tricked into going to bed too early. Thus it is probably worth investing in good blackout curtains or blinds (hence the blinds company sponsorship of the survey). But the tykes still know it’s light outside, and thus balk at nodding off – not an unreasonable attitude, in evolutionary terms.
To get them into a routine, at regular set times, is another good strategy. But the real problem is that most children don’t want to go to sleep when you tell them to – and short of dosing them up with Calpol (believe me when they were younger I wasn’t beyond giving it a try), there’s precious little you can do about it. Going in and shouting “Go to sleep!” is not necessarily the most effective solution. I should know, I’ve tried enough times.
The bedtime problem doesn’t only occur for children. I have slumber issues with my wife, mainly because she likes to watch TV/muck about on her computer/read, whereas I like to go to sleep, which in my primitive and increasingly post-sexual mind is what a bed is for. We did enter into an agreement that the TV should be switched off at a certain time, but that lasted about as a long as a truce between Russia and Ukraine.
So what is the solution to bedtime stress? As in so many problems, I find the answer is to give up. Our youngest, Louise, who is eight, once received nightly imprecations to switch off the light and get with the sandman, but to no avail. Now we leave her with a book and let her get on with it. Sometimes she will still be at it hours later when we go to bed ourselves, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference to her mood when she wakes up in the morning – it’s terrible whatever we do.
The matter of my wife and myself is not so easily solved. I find regular arguments help – one should never underestimate the possibility of simply grinding someone down with moans. However, my wife is probably even more stubborn than I am, so this rarely works.
I’ve come to a solution – of sorts. Nowadays, I find myself snoring and getting up in the night to take a whizz, both of which annoy her consummately. So although this is a battle I am never going to win, at least I get my revenge. Sometimes, in a family, that’s as much as you can hope for.
