School nights - 9:00 PM bedtime - I have work to do after the kids are down, and them being up too late makes me have to be up too late. Weekends and holidays are a little looser, but not by much. On a side note, I wish I could get them to either sleep in on the weekends or wake up as easily and early during the week as on Saturday and Sunday mornings…
Well, it starts with gently whispering, proceeds to tickling, shaking the bed, pulling off the covers and then the ice cubes in the washcloth…
Ah, but they’ll be specific types of pyjamas, and the girls would be mortified if they were seen in the wrong ones. Hell, you could mortify girls that age just by threatening to walk them to the school gates. 
Yeah, and they don’t wear pajamas and go in with unbrushed teeth and hair and a pillow mark on the cheek. Marched in by mom.
Ok then, I have a fallback plan. People have described it as evil…but I think it’s not too bad. How about a soundproof nursery? Hell, the kid’s supposed to be sleeping, anything like poop or being hungry won’t kill them in one night, so why should I have to bother getting up in the middle of the night to take care of it? A few months of forced sleeping through the night should teach him that night time is for sleeping, and if he wants anything, he better learn to do it himself. That’s not too evil is it? It just seems so pointless to have to get up and walk a baby to sleep or sing to him or something. He’s awake, so what? Ignore him until he falls asleep eventually, he should get the point
That’s not as unusual as you might think. Some people do controlled cryingwhich includes ignoring the baby’s cries but in a structured way. Soundproofing the nursery might be a tad dangerous, though.
However, really tiny babies do need feeding every few hours and it would be evil to leave them crying when they’re hungry. It wouldn’t kill them in one night, but it could kill them over time and create permanent health problems.
Anyway, I co-slepy when my daughter was tiny and barely even woke up when she woke up for a feed. Easy. More difficult for those who aren’t single parents, admittedly.
snerk Oh right, my mistake, how could I be so oblivious to fashion? 
Until I went to high school, there was a strict 9:00 bedtime, with 9:30 on weekends. Imho, this wasn’t enough. I was a big sleeper (usually need 10 hours) and I was chronically late to school for years.
It would depend on the child. Some people, like my friends in high school, felt great with 6 hours, and if they slept more than that, they felt tired. On the other hand, others went to bed at 8pm.
The Firebug is 2.5 years old. (And today’s the 1-year anniversary of the day the adoption agency called us up to tell us about him. What a year!) We have a phased bedtime: upstairs and into PJs at about 7:40, give or take; the toys get put away at 8pm, and we read to him until lights out at ~8:15, then we cuddle and sing lullabies for another 15 minutes or so before putting him in his crib. Kind of a gradual winding-down from the day and into sleep.
I can’t recall ever having a set bedtime in my life. I was 9 the first time I stayed up all night. (Listening to the radio on a Friday night.) I have very vivid memories of watching Saturday Night Live in 2nd or 3rd grade and mentioning it to a teacher who exclaimed, in surprise, that she couldn’t even stay up that late. David Letterman was an old friend of mine by the time I was 11.
I have a strong sense that every body is different. Not everyone needs 10.5 hours of sleep a night at age 8 (honestly sleeping from 8:30 pm to 7 am strikes me as somewhat excessive) and deciding when or how much someone else sleeps (or eats) is akin, to me, to deciding when or how often someone else urinates. It just doesn’t compute. I was raised with this philosophy and if I’m ever fortunate enough to have a child I imagine I’ll stick to it. Anything else just makes me twitch, frankly.
This is the other problem I have with strict by-time bedtimes (no matter what that time is). You obviously needed more sleep but instead of going to bed earlier (or your parents directing you to bed earlier) you stayed up until bed time, because that’s the time to go to bed. It seems arbitrary to me.
While my kids rarely had a bed time based on the reading of the clock, we did have our nightly routines and such- they didn’t just run around willy-nilly until they conked out from exhaustion or anything like that. And up until they could do it for themselves, they were told when to be in bed, we just never picked a particular time that would occur, but let it happen naturally and did not enforce it by the clock. What happened instead is that we did the bedtime routine- bath, brush teeth story(ies) then they would actually go to bed when they needed to (whether they crawled in themselves or were directed to do so) and the really interesting part of that is that they each found the time that worked for them and ended up in bed about the same time each night (and woke up about the same time each day). So they did sort of have a “bed time” it was just one that they found themselves and that they probably didn’t even realize (as small children) was around the same time each evening.
I never gave my kids a bedtime.
How would YOU feel if I made YOU go to bed when you were not tired?
(Ditto for not making a child eat when he is not hungry)
Um, parents do have some control over when their kids get to use the bathroom, once the kid’s old enough to physically control their bladder.
Kids aren’t supposed to have free choices over everything in their lives - or even over most things. It’s not fair on them to ask them to take on that much responsibility. Knowing the difference between ‘alert enough to stay up longer’ and ‘yeah, it’s really time to sleep now or I’ll be exhausted tomorrow’ is something that most kids can’t do - they need to learn gradually.
If you stayed up all night on a Friday at the age of 9, didn’t you end up sleeping all through Saturday? Most kids couldn’t do that because they’d be going out to play with their friends or doing activities or something.
I’d probably benefit a lot from someone making me go to bed at a reasonable time. We’re not talking about forcing kids to go to bed when they’re not tired, we’re talking about having a routine.
One poster talked about being strapped down as a child - that’s cruel. Other posters are talking about making sure their kids are in bed, doing quiet stuff or trying their best to sleep with the lights off. That’s not exactly inhumane.
Well, if you were the one who had to make sure I got to school on time the next day, and I was chronically or constitutionally unable to do so all by myself (since to make your example in any way accurate, you’ve got to assume I’ve got the mental, emotional, and physical capabilities of a six year old), I’d probably give you some leeway.
Well, with kids sometimes you do have to decide when or how often someone urinates. When you’re potty training, having them at least try to urinate on a schedule helps them learn control over their body, as well as reducing accidents and building confidence. And later in life, teaching them that going to the bathroom before a 2 hour car ride, even if their bladder isn’t full at the moment, makes the ride quicker and easier for everyone else since it reduces the chances you’ll have to stop on the way.
And eating - if I’m a parent cooking a meal, the kids are going to sit down in front of it when its ready. They don’t get to pick when & what to eat, until they’re capable of fully feeding themselves - from prepping the food to putting the cleaned dishes & utensils away.
For a 6 month period, around her first birthday, my daughter’s sleeping schedule was as follows:
7:00am - wake up
3:00pm - time for nap
5:00pm - wake up
8:00pm - bedtime
Her mother was VERY put out when that schedule changed.
Nowadays, she has to go to bed around 8:30 (she is 8). My opinion is that I don’t care if she’s sleeping, reading, or whatever, just get in your room and leave us alone!
We have an enforced bedtime of 7:30 for the 6 and 2 year-old. I’ve told Fang (6) that he can start staying up later, if (as soon as the alarm goes off) he can get out of bed, get dressed, get downstairs and fix his breakfast and out the door to the bus stop without any prodding.
I’m not seeing a later bedtime any time, soon.
At my daughter’s school if a student isn’t in uniform they’re sent home or parents are called back to bring something. While most kids would love that, we parents do not.
I’ve never had a problem getting my little girl up in the morning but I was so rotten my mom would get me with a water sprayer many mornings. It did work!
Sure, they say they’re not tired, but the data have shown otherwise. Fang has fewer problems in school when he goes to bed earlier.
I would probably think it was weird that this woman was treating me, an adult, as a child.
As far as bedtime goes, my 3.5 year old definitely goes to bed when we tell her, usually around 8:00. On workdays, we need to get her up at 6:45 and she usually is not exactly springing out of bed ready to get up.
I think there is a difference between the amount of sleep that a child needs to merely get by and what is actually good for them. A child (and I mean child not teenager) left to their own devices will tend toward the former rather than the latter.
Then you could give them their uniform in a bag so that they can get changed at the school. In reality, of course, it’s unlikely you’d ever have to go through with taking them to chool in their PJs.