It’s Summer, And The Kids’ Bedtime Is a Struggle
Here Are Four Strategies That Are Somehow Helping
I grew up in Northern Indiana, and one of my fondest memories is of the long summer evenings. I could stay outside with my friends until 9 p.m. and the sun would barely be setting.
As a parent? What a disaster, man. I live in Las Vegas now. The evenings aren’t quite as gloriously long as in Indiana, but as the mother of a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, they’re certainly long enough. (There’s also a baby, but she doesn’t care one way or another whether it’s light out when she goes to bed.) At 7 p.m. it’s still entirely light outside. When you’re a toddler with a lot of life in you, going to bed before the sun is entirely unacceptable.
So, yes. We’ve been on the struggle bus for quite some time now. In fact, we boarded it somewhere around late January, when we moved to a new house/the baby arrived/the 2-year-old found herself thrust into a Big Kid bed. We moved to the front seat of said struggle bus when she figured out how to escape the Pack ‘n Play we used as our last-ditch effort to keep her in the bedroom. Now the kid is the driver of the bus. Destination unknown.
Leaving aside the metaphor that I’ve now completely overused, I will say this: every day, come afternoon, I dread the arrival of evening. I never know if the night will involve a big bedtime fight, or if the kids will miraculously cooperate and go down easily.
The good news is, it’s not as bad as it was a month or so ago. My husband and I have managed to stumble on four strategies that, combined, have tremendously reduced our nightly struggle.
Light
I don’t know exactly when or why it started, but our son suddenly began requiring us to leave the hallway light on, to guard against bad dreams. I don’t love leaving lights on at night, so we started putting him to bed with one of those fancy flameless LED candles.
Unfortunately, his sister destroyed 2/3 of the candles — as it turns out, the wiring isn’t sturdy enough to withstand being tossed over the side of a raised bed! — right around the time she began demanding to sleep with a candle too. So I got them some silicone LED lamp animals that are more able to withstand abuse.
Do they sleep well with the lights? I’m not sure. But at least no one is yelling and crying in the middle of the night because it’s “too dark.”
Open Door
This one is weird. Your mileage may vary. A big source of our struggle was actually closing the door at night. Again, “too dark!” The sister would cry, and then the brother would scream because he didn’t like the crying. So one night, I decided to just…leave the door open and leave. And, much to my surprise, no one protested.
I think this one works because they’re able to experience the setting of the sun from their beds. Yes, the house is completely light when they go to bed, but over the course of a half hour or so it gradually gets darker, until finally it’s as dark outside their bedroom as it is in.
This hack does require turning off all the lights in the main area of our house, which means I often end up cleaning up the kitchen in near-darkness, but boy is it worth it to not have to yell at the kids to be quiet and stay in their beds twenty times a night.
Early Bedtime
When I told my mom friends about this hack they all told me they’d discovered it ages ago. And then I yelled at them (in all-caps format) for not sharing it with me earlier.
So in case, dear reader, you haven’t discovered this one, let me tell you. Aiming to put the kids in bed at least a half hour earlier than you actually want to leave the room for the night is freeing. Little one comes out claiming she needs to pee? No problem. Big one yelling for reassurance that the neither fire alarm nor the intruder siren will go off in the night? Gladly. I will happily rub backs and smooth bedsheets until 7:30 p.m. After that, they usually start settling down a bit more, and by 8 p.m. I can usually leave for good.
Consistency
This was one thing I always tried to be good about when my son was younger, but which I lost track of once his sister got older and the baby arrived with her own world-rocking needs.
For a time, I was letting #2 sleep wherever she would stay. In the bedroom with her sister? Fine. In the guest bed? Also fine. As long as she stayed put, I let her choose her sleep space.
Then there was the issue of a bedtime bribe. It started out with two chocolate chips for staying in bed, then moved to a piece of cheese, and then a graham cracker, which you can imagine ended up all over the sheets. Then one night I declared, “No more bedtime snack!”, caved in five minutes later, and realized that I’d turned into the pushover mom I always swore I would never become.
So I started enforcing the rules. She had to sleep in her bedroom. In her bed, not under it, and not in her brother’s bed. And, of course, no more snacking in bed, for real.
It was hard. The first few nights involved a lot of crying — that was when I discovered the open-door trick, actually. But we got over the hump, and now, even though my daughter still asks for a graham cracker every night, she accepts her fate and generally, eventually gives in to sleep.
Yes, we still struggle, but the struggle is less stress-inducing. Using the strategies above, the kids at least stay in their bedroom, for the most part, and that’s an improvement from where we were just a month ago. Will it get better? Gosh, I sure hope so. In the meantime, I’m counting down the days until I have teenagers who need dragging out of bed. Because teenagers are surely easier than toddlers…right? I guess I’ll just have to wait to find out on my own.
