The baby years are the worst, they said. It gets easier as they get older, they said.
They are wrong. In my eight years of being a parent, I am forever learning new things. One thing I discovered is that it is very hard for the parent, who is tired after a day of working, cleaning and other generally boring adulty things, to go to bed. This is because the child, who is also very tired, won’t go to bed.
I was already aware of this difficult stage from battling it with my daughter when she was five. She’s eight now and those days are long gone, thank god. But we’re now going though it with the youngest, who has reached the dreaded fearsome fives and is ten times more stubborn and determined to avoid bed than the eldest ever was.
It’s a difficult stage and I’ll admit my patience is waning. Every night, without fail, my five-year-old tries to make the bedtime routine last as long as he possibly can in order to avoid having to go to bed. He’ll do one or sometimes even all of the following things to draw the process out:
Sort through his huge collection of books.
Organise his toys as slowly as he possibly can.
Decide that he suddenly needs the toilet right before bed.
Insists that his Gigapet needs feeding and that it will die if he doesn’t give it any food (despite me telling him that it is a digital pet and not a real one).
By the time the husband and I have put them both to bed, we both feel like zombies. I check the clock to see if I can still have a hot drink and a snack, because my stomach doesn’t agree with food late at night like it used to. Don’t you just love getting older?!
The struggle is real!
So, I’m sharing ten things that I am currently trying out to help me to tackle the bedtime routine with kids.
Setting an earlier bathtime
As kids get older, dinnertime and bathtime will naturally change. We used to start the bath routine early when they were babies. Then it became a little bit later as the kids got a little bit older. Now, however, we’ve switched back to an earlier time. This gives the five-year-old plenty of time to sort through his books, toys, sit on the toilet and do all the other things that he does at an infuriatingly, deliberately slow pace.
I used to love the darker evenings. I could pretend that it was much later in the evening than it actually was!
“Oh, look how dark it is outside!” I used to say, at 6pm in the evening. “Time for bed!”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work anymore. Kids are much cleverer than we think!
Banning all technology
The eight-year-old is much easier to deal with than the younger one when it comes to imposing a technology ban before bed. It’s still a challenge, but not as bad as trying to persuade the five-year-old to put his Gigapet to sleep for the night.
Who’d have thought that a bloody digital dinosaur would cause so much trouble?! If you’ve ever considered buying your child one of these, then bloody don’t! I regret it, because at five, they are still too young to understand that they have to tear themselves away from it.
It can be hard even for adults to put their mobile phones away, so it must be far more difficult for a five-year-old to know when enough is enough!
There is just no getting through to an overtired five-year-old who is resisting bed because he is worried that his digital dinosaur will starve to death.
More bedtime stories
Both the kids are currently going through this stage where they would rather read a book to themselves than to me or their dad. I can understand this with the eight-year-old, but five is still a very young age, so we’re still trying to persuade him to read to us.
We’ve suggested turn-taking, where he reads a page and then we read out a page to him. This takes a bit of pressure off him. It also enables us to keep a little bit of the lovely bond that is formed through reading stories to them as a baby. I’m trying to make the most of it, because one day (and this is already happening with the eight-year-old), they won’t want us reading stories to them anymore!
No snacks
Yeah, this one is kind of hard to avoid. My five-year-old has an appetite to rival that of a grown man and is constantly hungry. Usually at bedtime.
“No sugar after 6 pm!” I call out, while sneakily looking through their stash of Halloween sweets. Which is big enough to last them an entire year.
Making bedtimes clear
This one is also tricky.
“But she’s going to bed late! Why can’t I?” says the five-year-old, pointing at the eight-year-old.
Nothing gets past this kid. He’s got a point, though. One of the hardest things about having an age gap between siblings is that the younger one wants to do everything the older one can. It makes tackling the bedtime routine with kids even more difficult if you have more than one kid!
We’ve tried to explain that younger children need more hours of sleep but it’s kind of hard. They don’t care about that, no matter how tired they are.
“I’m too tired to sleep!” our son shouted once.
That was when he was three and it still stands now.
Keep their favourite book or toy close by
An overtired child plus a lost toy or book equals a disaster. Keeping a book or toy that he loves close by sometimes helps our five-year-old to calm down and get into bed when we ask him to.
Note that I said sometimes. He’s a stubborn one, so this method doesn’t always work, but it’s definitely one of the best methods for tackling the bedtime routine with kids!
Keep siblings the hell away from each other
We try (and often fail) to keep our kids away from each other after a certain time. They are more likely to fight with each other when they’re tired and the five-year-old has a habit of annoying his sister (as siblings sometimes do!). He will often wander into her room and she wanders into his.
I have to explain that bedtime is not a good time to be trading Pokémon cards or comparing digital pets. I’m trying to teach them the importance of personal space, which admittedly can be hard to do with a five-year-old!
Keeping bedtimes consistent
This is very hard to do – definitely one of the most challenging ways of tackling the bedtime routine with kids, especially when one child is resisting going to bed. We try to keep it to an earlier time on school nights and then allow a slightly later time at weekends.
It can be easy to slip out of routine during times such as the summer holidays, especially when the evenings are lighter, but we try to keep to our usual routine as much as we can.
Skipping baths
The kids usually have a bath every day, but if they are really tired or we are later getting home for a trip out than expected, then we sometimes skip this part of the routine.
It removes the challenge of persuading an overtired five-year-old to get into the bath after a long day. The whole bath situation is still a challenge though.
“But I’m not itchy!” he’ll say, on the days when we do include baths in the routine.
“Ok, don’t have one then, we’ll skip it tonight,” I reply, too tired to explain to him that you don’t always have to be itchy to have a bath. Then we’ll get him into his pyjamas and he’ll say:
“But I’m itchy! I do need a bath!”
And then there’s the challenge of getting him out of the bath that he didn’t even want to get into in the first place.
Kids! Don’t you just love ‘em!
He’s not a toddler anymore, so I honestly thought these days of refusing to get in the bath, announcing that he suddenly wants one and then not getting out of it were over! Lots of parents go through this though and I’m so glad I’m not alone in dealing with this!
Switching the television off at a set time
I’ll be honest – I allow the kids to have some screentime after school. It helps them to wind down and relax, but it can sometimes be hard to tear them away from it. I understand how they feel – I was exactly the same when I was a kid. I used to love relaxing in front of the television, watching shows such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Sister Sister.
We’ve started switching the television off at a set time now. It reminds them that the bedtime routine is about to start. The five-year-old takes a lot of persuading, but I’m hoping, in time, that this will improve!
And so…
If you’re thinking of cracking open the wine or consuming that huge bar of chocolate after putting the kids to bed, please do! Trying to tackle the bedtime routine with kids is bloody hard and you deserve it!
Off I go to check the clock…chocolate doesn’t agree with my stomach late at night anymore.
Sigh.
