When I was a little kid I had to go to bed at 7 or so, so I share the annoyance at having to be in bed when it was light out. The only other clear memory I have about bedtimes was that I must have had a 10:00 one during my late junior high/early high school years (this would have been around '78-'80) because I remember being very angry that I couldn’t stay up and watch Vega$.
Oh, and as a special treat when I was little, I got to stay up and watch *Baretta *with my mom. It wasn’t that I particularly loved *Baretta *(I liked it fine but it wasn’t a specific favorite), but my mom had a crush on Robert Blake and any excuse to get to stay up past bedtime was fine with me!
Like Gamehat & Infovore, I recall being in preschool and very angry to be sent to bed during the summer while it was still light out, but it doesn’t get dark until after nine during the summers here (sunset isn’t until 8:30 in July). In elementary school it was 9, and when I was in 7th grade I got extra special permission to stay up until 10 once a week to watch The Young Riders, so my bedtime was clearly earlier than that. Probably 9:30. And when Twin Peaks was on a year later, I still wasn’t allowed to stay up past 10, so I missed it. Starting in 9th grade I was allowed to go to bed whenever I wanted, which was generally before 11.
However, starting when I was 12 I didn’t need to be up for daycare or anything during the summer - in fact I became the babysitter then - so we were both allowed to stay up as long as we felt like then…often until 4am because he was such a handful and sleeping until noon or one meant that much less time before our parents got home. Bedtimes were also not enforced on Friday or Saturday nights.
When I was 4 or 5 I remember it was 9 pm sharp. When I was younger than that, I think it was earlier, but I don’t remember it. When I was 6 or 7 it got upgraded to 9:15. Whoopee. Live it up.
I don’t remember exactly when I discarded the entire concept of a bedtime set by my parents, but I couldn’t have been older than 8.
My Mum was very keen on early bedtimes for me and my brother. My brother was 2yrs younger than me and I remember bedtime been around 8pm. She would like to bath both of us around 7pm and get us into our pyjamas and into bed for 8pm. When I was 10 we had a new baby brother and our Mum said our Bedtime would be the same time as him as we all had the same bedtime and she didn’t want him disturbed if we went to bed later so our bathtime was moved to 6pm straight after tea and bedtime was now 7pm. Both me and my brother hated it and this early bedtime continued until I think I was around 12 yrs old. We dare not tell our school friends how early we went to bed as most of them were still playing out when we were all been put down for the night
No memory any specific time. I do vaguely remember saying the “Now I lay me down to sleep. . .” prayer when I was very young, although we were not a religious family. I do know that by junior high I was making my own hours.
No, I have no memories of childhood bedtimes. Strangely, one thing I remember is that the bed I slept in in early childhood was a sort of semi-crib – a normal single bed but with low protective barriers halfway down from the headboard side.
That’s a very early time. My mom also wanted quiet time when the baby slept, which in my case was a “play nap”. I was supposed to play quietly in the living room while my mom and the younger children slept. I liked my play nap, that was my own time, and within the boundaries of “quiet and in the living room” i had a lot of freedom then.
I don’t remember what time i had to put my lights out in the evening, but it was early than i wanted to sleep, and i used to read under my covers with a flashlight.
9pm on school nights, no set time on weekends or in the summer.
When I got into high school I was allowed to stay up on school nights until after the news ended at 10:30.
I usually was zonked out before that time anyway.
I have two specific memories about bedtime, which I can place fairly closely in time (year-wise) since we moved within days of my 5th birthday.
For the first, I must have been 4 since it was the old house but I have a pretty clear memory of it. I was brushing my teeth getting ready for bed when my parents called me into the living room. They were watching Ed Sullivan and a puppet show was on. I liked the puppet shows but not the grownup stuff. Ed Sullivan was at 8pm on Sundays so 8 or thereabouts must have been my general bedtime then.
Then I remember being in the new house, but things were in disarray, so I’m guessing it was not long after we moved in. I remember seeing ‘The Wide World of Disney’ come on TV and being sad because I couldn’t watch it, being my bedtime. TWWoD was on at 7:30 Sunday nights then.
So, oddly, it seems like my parents made me start going to bed a half hour earlier when I was a year or so older. Maybe because when I was 4 I hadn’t started school yet, but by the time I was 5 I had Kindergarten.
I was a kid in the 60s and 70s. My sisters and I didn’t have a set bedtime for many years. My mom or dad would say, “Time for bed”, and off we’d go. Then suddenly, one day we had a bedtime. I must have been around 10; my sisters were younger. I’m not sure what brought it on; I’ve always wondered if my dad heard some of the other guys at work talking about it and he decided it was a good idea. Our new set bedtime was 9:00, but I think during summer vacation it varied. All in the Family came on at 9:00 on Sundays. We wanted to watch that show so badly. We’d beg and beg to stay up so we could watch it. My dad would always say that it wasn’t a kids’ show. Then, after way too much begging and whining, he just gave in.
9PM Sunday - Thursday for the longest. This was regardless of whether school was in session or not, so it did mean some summer nights when it was still light out -__- . We could petition for exceptions if there was a special movie of the week or something coming on TV - it required us agreeing to a nap earlier in the day. This changed to 10pm by middle school, and eventually 11:30p by high school so I could watch the 11pm news.
Fridays we had no bedtime and could stay up as late as we wanted - this was specifically so we could watch the Big Chuck & Little John show (a legendary Cleveland late-night television program that showed bad movies interrupted with hilarious skits performed in front of a live studio audience).
Saturday’s bedtime was 11pm, as we had to get up in the morning for church.
By 11th grade this pretty much went out the window - i could stay up as late as i needed to get my HW and term papers done, watch the news, etc. I was usually in bed by midnight regardless.
Same here, except it was 11:00. I remember being in bed, trying to watch the end of the 2½ hour final episode of “M * A * S * H” in '83 and getting caught.
9 pm on school nights through junior high. I remember how excited I was when I got permission to stay up until ten on Sundays the last five weeks of the semester so I could watch the hour-long Twilight Zone.
My parents weren’t terribly strict, but they did establish rules. One of those was that we kids could stay up until 8:00 PM when we were 8 YO, then an additional half-hour until we turned 12 (bedtime at 10:00 PM). At 14, we could stay up until 11:00 PM. Of course, it was irritating that my older brother could see THIS show at 9:30 PM while I couldn’t, but those were the breaks.
My parents were actually sort of slack about enforcing the rules about bedtimes, but my siblings weren’t. Every sibling made sure my parents were well aware of who was still up and exactly what time it was. My younger brother would actually come down from the bedroom at 9:40 PM to see why I wasn’t in bed yet.
My parents more or less gave up putting me to bed early when I was a little kid and refused to go. I actually remember watching the 10 o’clock news with my parents when I was not yet 5 (this was likely in the summer when I wasn’t in kindergarten so perhaps it wasn’t on school nights, I don’t know anymore).
Given how strict they would become with me in general when I reached school age, I was really lucky on this one. I remember being 9 and having new neighbors. They had three (later four) children from two of the father’s marriages. The father I remember as an honest but strict man. The second child was a 10-year-old boy. I remember being aghast when (I think it was on Halloween after we went trick-or-treating) he told me had to go home and be in bed by 8:30.
That said, as a small kid I was still put to bed just before my parents went and in general the whole family didn’t stay up until crazy hours of the night. There’s no way my parents would have tolerated my fooling around in my room at midnight. Another thing: my father came from a family where he would read in bed with a lamp past his bedtime. My mother came from a regimented military family where, until she was of an age when she had to study late, there was a lights-out routine every night at 9 or 9:30 for the whole family (in Communist Jugoslavia, where many people worked from 7 to 3). She would get up early while my father would snooze when he could. Every weekend, she would wake me up and she would get annoyed if my father didn’t get up past a certain hour.
All I really remember is that I could stay up late to watch Ernie Kovacs, which came on at IIRC 9:30 in Dallas. Since the last version of his show was when I was 9 years old, I’d guess I was sent to be at 9:00-9:30 other nights.
The first hard and fast bedtime I really remember was 11:00 when I was a high school freshman.
