Not all of them. One of the amusing things about raising twins is watching two different reactions to the same stimulii. At age 2.5 my son usually needs 12 hrs of sleep, between nap and nighttime; but my daughter cannot sleep for more than 11 combined, and often closer to 10.
I try (and fail more often than I succeed) to be mindful of what I do myself when admonishing my kids. For instance the other day I was after one of my three year olds (I only have two) because she wasn’t using her utensils - as I was eating a piece of chicken with my fingers. Duh.
One thing that happened after a while is they started wanting to do things themselves but couldn’t communicate it. For instance the carseat battles became more peaceful although longer-lasting affairs once we clued in to the fact that they just wanted to do some things themselves. We started off with them just climbing into the seat, and we would do all the buckling. Then they wanted to do the top buckle (by that time they were speaking better). Now they do the top buckle and put the two cross-over bottom buckles together and push them into the clip (a tricky maneuver for an adult at times). Sometimes it takes longer than I’d like it to, but everybody’s happy with the result.
Alot of the time they insist on doing something themselves and we know they can’t do it, but we let them try anyway, get frustrated, and then they ask for help. It can be really time consuming but we try to work that little dynamic into the schedule as much as possible. If something’s terribly urgent they’re pretty good about letting us do stuff so we can get out the door.
The thing that still starts out with the best of intentions and ends up a living hell is going to the store. We don’t quite have that one down yet.
Also, anything major we try to do with them late in the day, if they haven’t napped, is typically doomed. We avoid that as much as we can.
That is soooo sweet - good for you!! “Gentle touch” is something I’ve been doing for a long while & it really helps. Re-directing is key - especially as they get a little older and more wilful. And you’d be amazed at what you can negotiate by doing end-arounds, rather than butting heads – 2-yr-olds are absolutely impossible at times, but NOT all the time.
Karp’s really great at suggesting tactics that work with toddlers - like, the other day, instead of “YOU WILL TRY THIS BROCCOLI”, I sold my daughter with “These are tiny magic trees” (eat it myself) “Want some?”
Sometimes you’ll see parents just emphasizing “do not”, rather than showing (not telling) the kid what they CAN do.
Or like the family I saw at a play-place in Arlington Heights (which is really fun, full of costumes and role-playing toys). Two parents, two grandparents and an infant were plopped on chairs while the 3-yr-old played. So it was time to leave, and the parents say “let’s go” a few times while sitting on their butts, having not moved an inch. The kid’s still playing. Then the Dad starts getting irritated. “I said it’s time to leave.” What - do they expect the girl to go find her own coat? Is she supposed to lead the way out? It’s always about show, not tell.
It worked for you. It did not, as I have said, work for us or our daughter. Do you think I’m lying? Would you like to talk to my peditrician, who we’ve had conversations with this about, repeatedly? My daughter, unless she is ill or something odd is going on, will not fall asleep before 9:30, and generally not until 10:00. And it does not matter if we put her down at 7:00 and ignore her or put her down at 9:00. And she never has since she was around two (she is now seven - I’ve had years of trying to get her an early bedtime.)
But the rules for bedtime and the actual bedtime need to be the same (I was/am your daughter…it’s almost 2 AM here. I have never been a great sleeper…I have to leave for work in 6 hours. That’s plenty of sleep).
As far as children are concerned I believe bedtime is the THE most important aspect of discipline. It is not just about how long they sleep for (though that is VERY important) it is about YOUR sanity. YOU and your spouse deserve time without the children. You deserve to have some post-child time and time in bed can’t hurt any child.
My son’s bedtime was 7:00 untill he was about 5/6. No consultation, no negotiation. I didn’t care if he read in bed or slept, he knew that was bed time.
We both needed that, him for sleep, me for sanity.
I didn’t mean to doubt you for a minute! I was just sharing my “tips or tricks” and sleep seems to be a big one.
I am sorry if I caused offence.
We’ve got a pretty big toolkit for toddlers (now that the twins are nearly 4)…If they don’t want to get dressed, the sockmonster usually helps. Pick up a sock, go “RAR!” and have the sock ‘eat’ the kids foot. Seems traumatic, but it isn’t.
Our family gets going pretty early in the morning M-F, so the boys go to their room about 8pm. If they’re tired, it’s lights out immediately, but more often, they get to play quietly before I go back up at 8:15-8:30 to turn the lights out. On occasion, we don’t go back up and the kids are usually passed out by 9pm. The quiet time lets them wind down a little, and while the times change, the routine usually doesn’t.
Let me add something that hasn’t been brought up yet: There’s quick, qute, imaginiative parent manipulation tricks for everything. (My favorite with a sobbing kidlet is to gasp quickly, point over their shoulder and say WHAT’S THAT!?! It’ll kick the kid out of the feedback loop.) But really, you can’t always defuse every situation. Sometimes being sat on the stairs or sent to their room IS okay. To always have a ‘good parenting’ solution readily at hand teaches the child negative things too. (Like when I’m bored, I do this, mom does something to make me happy.) They need to learn that it’s not always about them, that sometimes they’re not the center of attention.
Toddlers are ALL about boundaries. They’ve got brains, they’ve got mobility, but they don’t have any learned limitations yet. That is what makes it a trying time for parents.
And don’t underestimate a child’s abilities to put 2 and 2 together. Telling our 3.5 year olds that “You know how you should behave, and you KNOW you’re not behaving nicely.” is often a good way to get a change in their behavior.
I’m not advocating a return to the “spare the rod and spoil the child”, but I do think we forget sometimes that kids are kids, not small adults, and sometimes they need boundaries. The point is to give kids a breadth of experience. Sometimes it’s play time, sometimes it’s quiet time, sometimes Dad’s on the phone and sometimes it’s okay to wrastle.
I have to say, I’m somewhat discouraged by the parents of older night owls chiming in. I keep thinking there must be something I can do to get my 4-year-old to sleep earlier.
We have a bedtime routine that we rarely deviate from (traveling back from a holiday gathering or on vacation being the exceptions that I can think of ) and we lay out the expectation that she will actually go to sleep. She’s not really one for getting out of bed except to go to the bathroom, and the times when she calls us into her room we are firm with her. She really doesn’t even do that very frequently, and it’s generally after a tough day. But she will not fall asleep most nights before 10. She’ll lie in bed and talk to herself, or sing songs, or play with her stuffed animals, but she will not sleep. Many is the night when I am trying to fall asleep and I can still hear her.
So, while I am encouraged on the one hand that it’s not something I am doing wrong, on the other hand, I kept thinking there might be some magic answer out there that was going to change our sleep habits for the better.
Re. sleep.
My parents thought that other parents who couldn’t get the kids to bed at 9:30pm were “weenies”. Myself and Bro would drop into bed like stones when they said “you may go to bed now”, so evidently those other people didn’t know how to do things.
Then Lilbro was born and the parental units learned that when they sent us elders to bed they were pretty much giving us permission to sleep. Heck, either of us would have been happy to go to sleep at 8 if dinner hadn’t been at 9!
30 years later, us elders are still morning people; Lilbro is still an owl. SiL is an owl, the difference in biorrythms has caused a lot of tension in the marriage. So far, The Nephew appears to take after Daddy (my Bro) and be a morning person. But, like his Da, he’s perfectly happy waking up whenever and playing quietly by himself until any of the adults in the house pops into the room to see whether he’s awake yet.
That was pretty much our daughter - with the occational tantrum (which I thought was understandable - it has to be pretty boring to spend 2 1/2 hours in your room when you are not sleepy).
BTW, our son is like Nava and her oldest brother. With a bedtime moved back to 9:00 to accomodate her, we often find him asleep when we start looking for them to get them ready. He’ll just go to bed if he is tired. And he falls asleep when his head hits the pillow. Unless his sister keeps him awake.
I think you’re doing just fine, and if you read between calm kiwi’s lines, so does she. She doesn’t have a magic formula for making them unconscious, but she insists that any time after “bedtime” is Do-Not-Bug-Mom time that is the opportunity for sleep time. That’s all you can do: set up a time and a place for the opportunity for sleep. This, ideally, will coincide with some alone time for the adult(s) in the household.
I totally agree that kids have different sleep needs. I recently shared in another thread that my 13 year old has an 8:30 bedtime, and a few people thought that was strangely early for his age. Hey, what can I say, the kid needs a lot of sleep. He gets about 9-10 hours at night and often another one before dinner after his homework is done. But even at his age, he “goes to bed” before he goes to sleep, sometimes by an hour or more. He got used to some quiet alone time in his room as a toddler, because Mommy needed some quiet alone time when he was a toddler! So he reads, or plays Gameboy, or writes in his journal or lays and stares at the ceiling contemplating God and navel oranges or something (or, you know, that other thing 13 year old boys do…urgh.). I don’t care what he’s doing, as long as it’s quiet.
I babysit one kid who needs 3 hour naps in the middle of the afternoon, another who needs 20 minutes morning and 10 minutes afternoon. Yes, 10 minutes, and he wakes up fresh as a daisy! (Needless to say, I do NOT watch them on the same day!)
I’d also question your assumption that something needs to change “for the better”. Is she OK during the day? Can she focus on her schoolwork/playwork? If so, then I’d say 10:00 is fine for her to actually fall asleep. Is she cranky and irritable? Is she surprisingly uncoordinated or clumsy? Then maybe she needs a nap some other time. Whatever, you’re NOT going to force her body to sleep before it’s ready to, short of sedatives. Set your bedtime around what works for you and her (and the rest of the family), not around some storybook where everyone’s blissfully asleep wearing nightcaps at 8:00.
I know if I sleep too much (I loooove sleep, and will occasionally overdose on it if I don’t watch it), I get headaches and feel like crap. So more is not neccesarily better.
She is difficult to wake up in the mornings. I have to get her up and to daycare by a certain time so that I can catch the train to work. She is sometimes cranky after a particularly late night, but usually that self-corrects with her falling asleep earlier the next night.
The “problem” I have with it is that it does make my evenings less mine. We have a really small house and her bedroom is next to ours. Sometimes she keeps me awake with her talking and singing, and I have to go into her room to tell her to pipe down. I’ve thought of getting a white noise machine, but I’m scared of not hearing the kids when I need to hear them. It’s also hard for the adults in the house to want to get busy between the sheets with a 4-year-old voice piping up every now and again. The bottom line is, even though there’s not much tending to her that needs to be done when she’s in bed, I know she’s awake and it’s a presence in the house. But, I also know that’s my problem and not hers. I worry about what happens when she starts School school, as opposed to nursery school 2 days a week, but I guess we’ll find out then.
So, when I say that I hoped something would make it better, I didn’t necessarily see it that we are doing something wrong, or that she is doing something wrong. I just wish we were all sleeping more. Welcome to parenthood, right?
Thanks for the input, all. Didn’t mean to hijack the thread with my sleep woes.
If you want a tale of a child who didn’t go to sleep well who eventually started doing so, I’ll give you the story my parents tell me. Apparently, I was a child who slept through the night early and often, but was a challenge to make go to sleep in the first place.
As a toddler, putting me in bed and leaving me to cry was ineffective because I’d cry 'till I threw up. We had shag carpet(it was the 70’s). Didn’t take much cleaning vomit out of shag carpet to make Mom reconsider that strategy.
So we developed this routine–Watch the 10 o’clock news, then Letterman, then get a drink, then read two chapters of Heidi, then count to 500, then sleep.
Sometimes Mom and Dad thought about changing the routine, but I’d fuss.
And then one night, I said “I’m tired. Do we have to count?” No, we didn’t have to count. And after that point, the routine gradually got trimmed back till I could go to sleep on my own.
I don’t remember this, so I must have been fairly little–I know Heidi was when I was about 2.
So, it may happen that your daughter will start going to sleep sooner after bedtime.
Still, different adults take different amounts of time to go to sleep–my brother takes 45minutes to an hour. If my Sister in Law isn’t asleep ten minutes after she goes to bed, she’s annoyed, and she usually gets up again, with the intent of going to be when she gets tired. If my brother tried that, he’d never go to sleep. (I’m somewhere in between).
Thanks for explaining, it makes it easier to consider, and you do have a problem, I agree.
Have you tried exercise before dinner? While the soup is simmering, chase her around the house 'till you’re both exhausted and giggly? Send her out to the yard to chase the dog? Do 50 jumping jacks and run in place while trying to say the alphabet backwards? Teach her to jump rope? Climb in a flour sack and roll down a hill? Anything to get her heart rate up and her muscles good and tired.
Don’t do it right before bed, or she’ll be too excited to sleep, but try to tire her out earlier in the evening.
Would music through the bedroom walls be easier for you to listen to than chatter? Would it help her to keep quiet if she listened to quiet music at bedtime?
One other thing - I wouldn’t go into her room to tell her to pipe down. I bet she’s partly being loud on purpose to draw you in there. You might want to try an experiment and totally ignore her (barring screams of pain, of course!) for three nights running. I’d be surprised if she didn’t give it up as a bad deal and try something else. When I sleep-train toddlers, it’s very important to not make eye contact or speak while putting them back in bed. You want to be a robotic pair of arms, not a human to interact with.
And, I agree, it’s very likely to get better, not worse, when she’s in school. School is tiring, and that’ll help. Plus, when she’s just a tiny bit older, she’ll better be able to amuse herself quietly, instead of singing and talking to herself.
calm kiwiI completely respect the way you set up a household routine that took YOUR needs into account - I agree with you that that’s essential. A 7:00 bedtime isn’t the only way to achieve it, though; my husband doesn’t get home from work until at least 6:00, and he needs a little time to unwind. Around here, 8-9 p.m. is our best family playtime - we have a blast (most nights) hanging in the playroom together.
Hmmm – that depends on the child. Or children. Several times this summer when I was desperate for a break & they weren’t napping, I’d just insist they spend time in their bedroom. They’d make noise playing, and then it would grow quiet. Which I took to mean they were asleep. However, on more than one occasion I pulled myself away from the Internet (my favorite form of downtime) to verify my assumption, only to discover they’d emptied the contents of their diapers and created murals, sculptures, and body art.
Truly, some kids follow direction more easily than others, and it is NOT a reflection of “bad parenting”. Harvey Karp even talks about it - children are NOT all the same.
I was thinking along the same lines, too. I love tips and tricks and all that jazz and will discuss strategy online all day long if the kids will let me, just because I need to process this Parenting Experience.
That is NOT to say that I think it’s possible to always maintain the upper hand and practice good parenting. No frickin way. I spent the whole month of August screaming - one of my vocal chords is completely shot now. It was terrible.
And it passed.
Conventional wisdom and toddlers:
Conventional wisdom: If you put your kids to bed early, they will learn to go to sleep at that time, even if they are nightowls
My experience (with one): If you put your kids to bed early, at 10:00 your daughter will still be telling stories to her stuffed animals.
Conventional wisdom: Put food in front of your children. If they eat it, great. If they don’t, they’ll go hungry. No one ever starved in one night and it will teach them to eat what is put in front of them.
My experience: If they don’t eat, their blood sugar crashes and you have to deal with very crabby children all evening. Then they don’t sleep well because they are hungry. We have the peanut butter sandwich rule…you have to try what is put in front of you, but Mom will cave and let you have a PB&J sandwich.
Conventional wisdom: If you put up a sticker chart, your kids will potty train.
My experience (with both of them): If you put up a sticker chart, you will have spent the gross national product of Lithuania on stickers before they potty train.
Conventional wisdom: If you let them run around naked for a day, and put them on the potty at regular intervals, they will potty train.
My experience (I was only dumb enough to fall for this one once): If you let them run around naked for a day, you will spend the day cleaning up messes from the floor at at the end of the day they still won’t be housebroken, ur, potty trained.
(I’m glad they are seven and eight, much less parenting advice).
Oh gods, potty-training is a whole 'nother level of craziness. My favorite method (barring daycare rules to the contrary) is to keep them in diapers until they’re sick of them, rip them off and announce “Use potty now!” So much easier on all of us. 
I can’t find it right now, but in a thread in the past **WhyNot ** listed how she does timeout. I gender-adjusted it, made some modifications to make it a little closer to my routine and printed it on some pretty paper and now it is hanging on my refrigerator as a large magnet right next to our house rules. My son (now 5) is a “rules” kind of guy so he enjoyed going over them with me and setting them and now “enforcing” them with the one that is about to be 2. It’s a wonderful tool, and was absolutely invaluable when incorporating a step-family.
Food: we eat what I cook. Don’t like it? You can get a flour tortilla with peanut butter and a glass of milk if you try one bite. That’s the deal in my house.
Sleeping: Start bedtime routine at 8:00. Includes brushing teeth, putting on pajamas, and story time, then getting baby to sleep. After that , you can hang in your room if you are quiet. Go to sleep or not, just don’t come out with BS excuses (no, I didn’t put it that way to the kids).
Store/playground/whatever: everything gets the 5 minute warning. Works like a charm, but I have used it since 5 y/o was born. YMMV.
Oh, I forgot about that. I’m glad you’ve found it useful. I should go hunt it down for my husband, who hasn’t done this before. (He became WhyKid’s dad when WhyKid was 6.)
He was so cute the other night at the dinner table while I was gently trying to coach him through the process.
WhyDad to toddler: NO!
Me: Honey, tell her what she’s doing wrong.
WhyDad, looking puzzled:Um…stop throwing food on the floor?
Me:No, no, don’t tell her what to stop, tell her what she’s doing that you don’t like.
WhyDad: Oh. Uh. You may not throw food on the floor.
Me: Close. Tell her what to do instead.
WhyDad: What? Oh…uh…eat your food?
Me: Or…
WhyDad: Huh?
Me: What if she’s done? What should she do with her food then?
WhyDad (starting to look like a high school student facing the S.A.T.): Um, if you’re done…uh…leave your food on the plate?
Me: Nice. Now tell her again what she’s doing that you don’t like, and then tell her what will happen if she chooses to do it again. Try to make it “if…then”.
WhyDad: If you throw your food, then you’ll get a time-out!
Me: Good! How long?
WhyDad, exasperated: What do you mean how long? She’s 1, she doesn’t tell time!
Me: Well, no. But this is how she’ll learn. Be specific in the consequence and by the time she’s 3, she’ll know exactly how long a minute is.
WhyDad: If you throw your food, then you’ll get a two minute time-out!
Meanwhile, WhyBaby is looking back and forth at the two of us, utterly bemused by this whole process. She was distracted enough to stop throwing food, though!
I’m lucky my husband’s trainable. By the next night, he had it together like a pro.