I’ve never really had a bed time after 7 or 8 years old, but that’s because we were living in a small apartment at the time and I slept in the same room as my parents.
Once I had my own room, I had no bed times. I find the idea repugnant and am morally opposed to it. If the kids are tired in the morning, so what? A little tired won’t kill him, so if he wants to stay up I say let him. I don’t believe there are any long-term negative effects from going to bed late, I believe you can adjust your sleeping schedule with some practice as I’ve done.
Morally opposed? Like, you think it’s a not just unwise or pointless but morally wrong? God, there’s very little about parenting that I’d say was morally wrong. Abuse, neglect etc, the obvious stuff - that’s morally wrong. For the rest of the stuff I find it’s best not to judge.
My five year old goes to bed at seven thirty, but she’s never asleep until around eight thirty. She needs that time to relax. If I wait until eight thirty she won’t go to sleep until closer to ten. If I don’t force her down she will stay up and get more and more and more hyper until she’s climbing walls and biting the dog. She’ll stay up half the night, and still get up at six in the morning.
Some kids need routine more than others. So do some adults, come to mention it. I reckon most kids need a routine with bedtimes that they gradually get more control over, even though a few cope without.
Just like an infant going to bed at ten or eleven and waking up at 8 or 9 doesn’t sound too good to me; that’s a really late bedtime and not much sleep. But some working parents like bedtimes like that because they get to spend more time with the kids, some kids simply seem suited to that routine, and maybe the baby napped a lot during the day.
My daughter was asleep from 7pm till 8am (at least) from when she was a tiny baby, but only napped for a couple of hours till she was six months old, then an hour in the afternoon till she was a year old, and then she stopped napping altogether. For some parents and some kids that’d be a terrible way of going about things.
My 6 and 9 year olds are allowed a half-hour reading time at 7pm, then the lights go out at 7:30 (they have to be up by 6am for school).
DH and I were pretty lax about their bedtime routine until our second visit to a children’s sleep psychologist. You see, the older child, my son, was experiencing multiple night terrors every night for MONTHS on end in the meantime. It wasn’t until we set up and enforced a consistent bedtime routine and set bedtime that the sleep interruptions stopped.
Now that I’m a teacher I have students whose parents allow them to stay up as long as they want to. Result: classroom nappers; poor grades; frustrated teachers.
My almost 2yo goes to bed between 6:00 and 6:30. Yes, you read that right. And since Krismas she has been sleeping through till 7:30 am, no waking. (Before that she would wake up once to nurse in that time.) It works, so I’m keeping it, regardless of everyone thinking we’re a little nuts. Marc Weissbluth is an idiot about a lot of things and I think 90% of his baby sleep book is best used as toilet paper, but instituting an ultra-early bedtime worked wonders for both our kids as babies/toddlers.
The 6yo has more flexibility. We try to start bedtime stuff around 7:00, and I like to be done by 8:00 so I have some free time. If she stays up and plays quietly, I don’t care. If she stays up too late (usually when out doing an activity, as she’s not going to stay up later than her body can handle if she’s in PJs in her room), she is noticeably grumpy, so we try to make sure she gets to bed on a pretty regular schedule.
Some SAHMs like that too because it is closer to our own sleep schedule. That is actually plenty of sleep for an infant when you factor in the several naps between feedings. I would be concerned if an infant (we are talking weeks or months old) slept for more than 8-10 hours at a time between feedings and diaper changes.
My son who was down from 10 or 11 until 8 or 9 am was still getting several naps a day, so that must be the difference. I would have worried excessively if he was sleeping 12-14 hours a night without waking in addition to his daytime napping. As it was he woke at 8 or 9, then had breakfast, bath, play, then a nap, then lunch, play, then a nap, then a snack and play, then a nap, etc. (again this was in the infant stage). When he was six months old or so the naps were longer but less frequent until he grew into a “normal” pattern of up for school at 7 or 8, and asleep for the night 9, 10 or 10:30 (varied by night and activities, but usually on his own without prompting).
I can’t imagine putting my kids to bed at 7 no matter how young they are- that boggles my mind. But then I also cannot imagine a child (who is not a teenager LOL) sleeping for 12-14 hours at a time either. None of mine ever did; they would get too hungry I think.
I suppose the right answer is: It depends on the kid
I don’t have any kids, and god forbid someday one comes into being on accident, I have a perfect plan. I plan on annoying the kid and keeping him awake during the day so he’ll be too tired to wake up and night and bug me. Seriously, that’s my plan. I won’t win father of the year I guess, but I’m fine with that
ha ha - and then you’ll discover that some kids reach a point of no return. They get so overtired that they scream for hours and hours and never go to sleep. Ever. Kids are good at coming up with little schemes like that ;).
Good luck with that. I tried very hard on a couple of occasions to tire out my hyperactive little angels so that they would fall asleep early and give Mommy some peace, but I found that their stamina was far greater than my own.
The real reason babies and small children take naps is so that Mommy and Daddy can recoup. Keeping the kidlets from their naps only served as punishment for me. As the previous poster points out once kids get too tired they aren’t sleeping at all. “Too tired to sleep” was coined just for them.
Beyonf the age of three or four I reckon most kids would be really embarrassed by that.
Have them write out a list of what they need to do in the morning (in time order). My daughter (who’s autistic) needed that because otherwise she’d just stand there, one sock in hand, with no idea what to do next.
Give them an incentive to get out of bed straight away. Her bedroom’s always cold in the mornings, so I take a fan heater in there; if she’s not at the top of her stairs (loft bed) by the count of three, she won’t get the heater.
Try your best to ensure that they have something that’s worth getting up for. If they don’t like school, and you can’t change that with a wave of the wand, at least give them something nice for breakfast.
Basically, the usual reward/reprimand carrot and stick cycle.
Younger Son will soon be 10. He must be in bed at 9:30 on school nights. If he’s not sleepy yet, he can choose a quiet, soothing activity, such as reading. He doesn’t have a lights-off time any more.
Elder Son will soon be 16. As we’ve explained it to him, he may not need a bedtime any more, but his father and I are old people now and we do. So he must be home by 11 on school nights and quiet enough that we parental units, as well as his little brother, can get some sleep. When he goes to bed, and when he turns off his lights, are his business.
Both of them understand that this is dependent on their getting out of bed at the time we’ve agreed on, being civilized at the breakfast table, and making it to school on time. And it works for our family.
We are big fans of the early bedtime (also from Weissbluth). Basically, our kids (5,3, and 2) wake up at 6:30-7 AM regardless of when they go to bed, and they’re super tired if they don’t go to sleep by 8. Since our kids are master delayers (especially the 3-year-old girl, the 5 and 2 year old boys share a room and so “go to bed” but actually mess around in the room for a long time), we find that if we don’t start bedtime stuff by 6:30, they won’t be asleep until 9.
Essentially, the later they go to bed, the more fights there are, and nobody’s happy then. We have on occasion had to institute a “no eating after 7PM rule”, as our oldest would string out his dinnertime, then complain about not getting any dessert because it was too late - so if there’s no eating after 7, then he can’t complain. Only took once or twice before it took.
8:00 PM as a very young child, and it meant war. Apparently the Perry Mason TV show came on at 8 and as a much older child I associated the theme song to Perry Mason with very ominous & thunderous forebodings. It has been confessed to me that they actually strapped me into bed to keep me from getting back up. Left to my own inclinations, I would have stayed up until 3 AM as a 3 year old, I suspect.
I remember an 8:30 bedtime, then 9, then 9:30, finally 10:30 in High School. When I visit my parents at the age of 50, if I stay up past 11:00 my Dad will come out of the bedroom (where he & my Mom have gone to sleep around 10:30) and ask if I ever intend to go to bed. They are totally diurnal and I am a “wake up at 9:00, go to bed at 2” kind of person.
From what I’ve seen of pre-teen and teenage girls, many do appear to be wearing their pajamas to school - T-shirts and pajama-style thin drawstring pants.
That is what I like to think I avoided by not having rigid times that the children must be in bed. I did often send them to bed when they needed to go, but it was dictated by them and their behaviors/symptoms of needing sleep and not by the clock.
Well at 3 years old kids probably still need direction when to go bed. Mine did, but again it wasn’t a set time, just after our nightly routine when they were ready, I would tuck them in. If you had been a bit older I suspect you would have only stayed up until 3 AM once or twice before you realized the error of your ways and started sleeping earlier (especially if you had to get up early and stay up). Barring any disorders or health issues (to include sleep disorder issues) I think most people (children included) can regulate their sleep pretty well (not always perfectly) and after just a small amount of trial and error will end up sleeping at the right time and waking at the right time for them.
I still occasionally tell my kids they need to go to bed, but again it isn’t time-based. And without having a rigid, set time, when they were younger I also never had to strap them down, send them back, argue about “just a five more minutes” and bedtime was never a hardship or a point of contention at all.
I never had to send a child to school in pajamas or without breakfast and none ever had problems with falling asleep or being overly cranky at school, so it obviously worked for them (thankfully!).
It is interesting to read about how others handle it though. I still can’t imagine having a child that went to bed when it was still daylight, but that just speaks to the individuality of each child.
I just think it’s weird and pointless, not morally evil
