Lileks discusses getting his little girl to go down for a nap:
It’s still not going well. I hear little feet hit the floor upstairs; I start up the stairs, and hear the feet scurrying back to bed. By the time I get to her room she’s making fake snoring sounds. I’m raising an actress. Or a sociopath. The difference is? Discuss.
I’m glad we don’t have to worry about nap time. Parents of two-year-olds have different priorities, I’ve noticed.
As I’ve observed in the past, Jackie and I have a weird dynamic with the other parents in our little group o’ friends; since Justin is quite a bit older than the rest of the kids, there’s a sense that the others are sort of taking notes on the sorts of things they’ll have to deal with when their kids get to that age, what we’re doing that they like and (let’s be honest) what we’re doing that they don’t like. They are doing this because they haven’t got there yet — we’re the ones hacking through the undergrowth to start the bare beginnings of a path.
Here’s the weird part: at the same time they’re doing this, we’re doing the same thing to them because, to us, they’re the ones hacking through the undergrowth to start the bare beginnings of a path that we’ve yet to walk. We’ve never been to that part of the jungle: we were airdropped (albeit knowingly) into the middle of the thing (after it had already been badly misused by other agencies).
Anyway, back to the naps & sleepytime.
We were over at the Consortium this weekend, being social with some of their ‘other’ friends — folks from out of town and whatnot. Over the course of the evening, while I was bitching talking about something else, I mentioned parenthetically that Justin would be in bed by seven on the night I was discussing, so at least he didn’t have to deal with the annoying thing that I was anticipating.
One of the other couples was there with their nine-year old daughter. (They are, I should point out, ten years older than us.) Mom stopped me in mid-sentence and said “Excuse me, how old is Justin?”
“Twelve.”
“How do you get him to go to sleep at seven?”
“I don’t,” I said.
Jackie finished for me. “We make him go to bed and be quiet. The rest is up to him.”
At his age you just have to accept that the goal is not getting the child to sleep — you can make the kid lay down and not bother you, but the rest is pretty much up to them.
“He’s probably in there reading books under the covers with a flashlight,” commented another guest.
To which I could only reply that, if he were, I’d probably buy him something as a reward. Something expensive. Certainly a better flashlight, at least.
It took awhile, but we’ve got a good system: Justin’s bedtime is entirely up to him.
See, we start with a Base time… let’s call it 8pm for the sake of argument… doesn’t really matter. Everytime Justin does something that (a) is bad behavior AND (b) is related to lack of sleep (I’ll let you figure out examples), he loses a half-hour off his bedtime.
He earns it back with three days of good behavior. If he screws up again during that three-day period the time drops another half-hour and the three-day counter ‘resets’. He and Jackie pretty much keep track of it. By this point it’s mostly him.
Theoretically, he could be going to bed at 10… 11… whatever. Theoretically. In practice, it hovers around 7 or 7:30, and has gone as early as 4:30, barely giving him time to get his homework done and grab a snack after school.
Yes, seriously.
He is has become really good about enforcing it — over time, he’s come to believe that the only way to do the things he needs to do to get the time back is to get lots of sleep. HE believes it. That’s important.
Last night, he and I were watching Buffy. We were right in the middle of the show (7:30) and he got up to go to bed. I almost let him stay up to finish it.
“I’ll rewind the tape tomorrow or something,” he said. “Maybe by next week I’ll be up to eight o’clock.”
That’d be cool.
