How do you handle different bedtimes for your kids?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve got 3 daughters, aged 9, 7, & 5. The oldest has her own room, the two younger ones share a room. The oldest has started quietly agitating for a later bedtime than her sisters. This is reasonable - they’ve got a 8:00 bedtime on school nights, and the oldest is often up a good half hour before the normal 7:00 AM reveille.

The problem is the extreme competition and “fairness” that the girls enforce - one of their main priorities in life seems to be making sure no sibling ever receives anything that they don’t get themselves. If we tried to let the older stay up past her sisters’ bedtime, there would be probably be serious, continual complaining, wailing, gnashing of teeth, etc.

So any advice how to handle this? Keeping the bedtimes the same for all of them for their entire lives until college isn’t feasible, but we’d like to try to avoid the headache of every night turning into a tear-ridden debate about fairness.

2

Why not tie bed times to a milestone like a birthday? So your eldest can get a later bedtime when she turns ten, as can the other girls when they turn ten.

It seems strange to me that an older child would not be given some liberties that a younger child isn’t. Surely that’s part of raising a child, to move them towards greater independence?

The answer to any wailing from the younger siblings is, ‘When you are x age, you can xyz as well.’ That way, in their minds, growing up gets tied to having more liberties because you’re now older and considered (and expected) to be more responsible and mature.

3

We had a little saying: Age has its privilege.

In other words, with age comes additional responsibilities and additional privileges. (comes? come? That looks wrong).

The older child was expected to do a little more around the house and be more responsible about their personal lives; they also got a little more privilege, such as a 30-minute later bedtime.

ETA: Great simulpost sandra. :stuck_out_tongue:

4

There’s your problem. Just tell them they cannot do any enforcing. The big people are the enforcers, it’s Nature’s Way.
Lay down the law and when “fairness” raises it’s ugly head repeat “Life is not fair, it’s not Nature’s Way. Big people rule.”

5

What is this “fairness” of which you speak? You pay the rent, you make the rules. Little people do what they are told, when they are told, or they can have a beating and then do what they were told.

6

And then do the evil laugh. It’s really important that you don’t forget to do the evil laugh. It’s even better if you rub your hands together as you do it. :wink:

7

If this is an ongoing problem, as opposed to something that comes and goes, and if it is true of all your children, you might want to reflect on whether something in the family dynamic is setting this up. It can be the case that parents encourage competition – and also a misplaced notion of what fairness actually is, which is not the same as competition for attention – without realizing that they are doing so.

Your desire to avoid their ire may be a subject on which you want to reflect.

I set bedtimes by working out when they wake up without an alarm clock and working backwards – after many years of lights out at 8, my 9 year old needs about 9 hours of sleep and my 7 year old 10 1/2 or 11. Their feelings about it have little to do with it, their bodies have to do with it. It is fair that everybody gets as much sleep as they need.

8

I never gave my kids a bedtime.

I figured they would go to sleep when they got tired…it worked!..they did.

9

I have always really liked this idea. On the proviso that they still have to get up the correct time tomorrow morning no matter what time they go to bed. Eventually it’ll sort itself out.

Otherwise, yeah - you are the parents and they are the kids. YOU do the enforcing.

10

So you explained to them why it’s not unfair for older children to have later bedtimes, and then what did they say? Do they get to complain and teeth-gnash their way into getting what they want?

11

I don’t think we encourage competition. It seems to be just a “Hey, G just got that! I want that too!” And we don’t want to avoid their ire because we think we’re bad parents if the kids get upset at us or anything, we want to avoid their ire because dealing with ire is tiring. It can often be necessary, and I don’t give in to demands to cut off the complaining, but we will try to avoid inspiring ire if we can.

And what did you do when they were impossible to get up for school the next morning?

This hasn’t happened yet. It’s still at the discussion stage. And no, they won’t get to complain and teeth-gnash into getting what they want.

Here’s the thing - bedtime is one of those things that pretty much requires the kid to cooperate. When the oldest got her ears pierced at the age of 8, the younger two wailed and complained that they wanted their ears pierced too. But so what? It’s not like they’d be able to go out to a back alley piercer and do it themselves. We told them that 8 is the age for ear piercing, they’d get theirs pierced in turn, and they eventually quieted down. (I did display a hammer, nail and cork and offered an at-home piercing by Dad, but they declined).

But bedtime is different. Short of physical means, you can’t force a kid to stay in bed. We can bring them back up, we can punish them, but there’s nothing preemptive we can do to stop the kid from getting out of bed and comes back downstairs, because “G gets to stay up late.” We can come up with a plan to deal with that, and I’m guessing it would probably calm down in a week or two, but I’m hoping to avoid that entire scenario.

12

The biggest and bestest (:)) rule is our house is the following:

“Fair doesn’t mean everyone getting the same. Fair means everyone getting what they need”.

I have had one child get cookies for snack and another fruit, because one had a sugary treat earlier and the other didn’t.

No complaining about “not fair”.

Best rule we ever made as parents!

13

Your kids are no fun.

I think the suggestions in this thread about explaining why it *is *fair are good, but if you want to be like my mom, you can affect the Stern Voice and just say, “Shut up and listen.” It was quite effective.

14

How much of a problem is it to get them to bed?

Me and Middlebro were “early in, early out;” it was the youngest who had to be dragged into and out of bed or the bathtube. The whole thing was handled quite badly, but it never involved us elders complaining about fairness. We were… yawn too sleepy… hrmmm to worry about him getting to bed later; so long as he didn’t switch the light on (waking Middlebro up), we didn’t care.

The only time we did complain about fairness was because Lilbro was able to escape duties that we two did have at his age and it hadn’t killed us. Mom tried to twist it into “well, we also help Middlebro with his homework more” - to a three-children chorus of “but he needs more help!” Lilbro was the first one to reckon that he did, indeed, have unfair privileges; Mom never admitted it so the fairness of work division had to be enforced by us kids.

15

What happens when the kids come downstairs after bedtime? Do they end up getting to hang out?

My brother and I - two years apart - were horrible at going to bed (still are!) I vividly remember lying in bed crying because I could hear the older neighbor kids outside playing, and because I knew my brother was up watching Dallas.

But, my folks made it so that getting up out of bed was no more fun than staying in bed. Meaning I was punished for getting up and always marched back to bed. I never actually got to watch tv or go outside to play.

Eventually, I’m sure I just dealt with it and stayed in bed. Of course, I got them back by being a bedwetter, but there you have it :wink:

16

If she is anything like my dad, it involved a bucket of cold water after the first ignored wakeup call.

My parents gave me a bedtime when I was younger, but they quickly gave up enforcing it, as I was just as happy sitting in bed reading as I was watching TV, so enforcement would have been problematic. There were a few grumpy mornings, but I eventually learned when to turn the lights out on my own.

17

Originally Posted by Susanann
I never gave my kids a bedtime.
I figured they would go to sleep when they got tired…it worked!..they did.

Here is the thing - I did not want them to go to school!!

I wanted to home school them. THEY!!! are the ones who wanted to go to school, not me!

They actually begged me to let them go to school. I told them if they wanted to go to school, they had to do it, because I wasnt going to help them other than setting an alarm clock. It was THEIR responsibility to get up, not mine. I really didnt want them to stay in school. They were motivated and they did it. All 4 kids.

They also had to be responsible themselves for their homework. I could and did help them, but I never made them do it. They knew they had to do it, else, they might get me for a teacher and would not be able to see their friends at school anymore. It was a real motivator.

I never had to yell at them . I never had to make them go to bed when they were not tired.

We used to joke about it, esp as they got a little older. We used to ask their friends and parents: Why not make ADULTS (parents) go to bed when they are not tired?

We also used to joke, with their friends and other parents, about “pretending to have a bed time” that they had to stay up even if they were tired, not a time when they had to go to bed, but making them stay up and awake and not allowed to go to bed, “not until bedtime can they go to sleep no matter how tired they are”.

It was crazy to see other peoples reactions, but I am glad that I never had a bedtime argument ever with my kids, not once. Never had a get up for school argument either.

It was so easy raising them.

I also never made them eat anything if they were not hungry. Again, we joked about making/forcing adults/parents to eat something that they did not want to eat.

Life and raising a family was so easy without all the stupid arguments and meaningless and NEEDLESS fights that parents have with their kids.

When I see or hear parents yelling and fighting with their kids about going to bed when they are not tired, eating things when they are not hungry, it makes me so sad for them. I hope your children get thru it ok.

18

Good for you!!

You learned to be responsible for yourself!!!

Isnt that the “real” goal?

19

YOu have to make them WANT to get up.

You dont raise kids by making their decisions by enforcing things on them, you teach them by allowing them to learn how to make their own decisions.

The goal of parenting, is to teach them how to do things, how to make judgements, to make GOOD decisions on their own .

YOu can tell them how to spend their money for 18 years, but then when you let them go on their own, they wont have any idea how to do it themselves.

Instead of making rules and “enforcing” things on the children, let them learn that they need to come to you to learn how to do things, how to make decisions.

The real accomplishment as a parent is instead of enforcing rules on your kids or always telling them what to do, instead, get them to voluntarily come to you for advice and guidance on how they are to make THEIR decisons. They need to learn how to make decisons, not follow rules.

20

It sounds like you have far greater problems than kids whining about their older sibling getting something. Enforcing bedtime should be easy peasy as a parent. If the kid gets up, frogmarch them back to their room and mete out an appropriate punishment. If you can’t win that battle you might as well disband the team and go bowling.