In our never ending quest to try to figure out what makes our kids tick (and raise the odds for pleasant behavior), my husband and I recently realized our daughter requires much more sleep than her brothers. This actually wasn’t a new realization, but one we’d chosen to try to work around in an effort to allow her to participate in the same evening activities they do. Well, it just wasn’t working. Cranky outbursts, unfinished homework and bouts of tears were the price we were paying for evenings filled with Brownies, church activities, and Tae Kwon Do.
We broke the news to her in the gentlest way possible. Bret even explained to her that she is likely growing bigger and faster than her brothers and thus needed more sleep, maybe a temporary thing…
She was furious! It wasn’t fair!
We agreed. It isn’t fair. Especially since one of her brothers is younger than she is, but that is how God made her. Some people require more sleep than others, Mom, for example, to be happy. We’d decided that from now on, 7pm was the time at which she’d be in her bed, tucked in. She could read or listen to music for awhile, but 7pm was when she needed to be in her bed. After the first night, we’d find her fast asleep by 7:10p.m., not to awaken until 7am the next morning. Life was more peaceful.
A few days later, on the first Friday of our new arrangement, she came to me and explained she thought that on weekends she thought she should be able to stay up later. I hesitated, thinking how easily a later bedtime on weekends could quickly spiral out of control, since she wouldn’t be able to make up the missed time. In that split second, she filled in the moment of silence by offering, “I think on the weekends I should be able to stay up until 7:04.”
Once again I was reminded how important it is to just keep quiet occasionally and let the kids do the thinking! Now that was a compromise I could live with!
What if you could blame your kids bad behavior on just one thing, a magic bullet. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I mean if you knew that eliminating red food coloring from their diet would make them into an angelic child 100% of the time, and that giving them red food coloring would make them into cranky brats, wouldn’t you eliminate the red food coloring in a heartbeat?
As a matter of fact, as parents, we do things like that all of the time. If we believe sugar has a negative effect, out it goes. If we believe the friends our kids hang around with make our kids behave poorly, we steer them towards new friends. We’re always looking for an easy way to make things just a little bit better, right?
Well, here it is. Your kids need to sleep more. How’s that for straightforward? There was an article on our kids’ lack of sleep in our local paper this weekend, the Pioneer Press. It was a terrific article, I’m including the link at the bottom of this post, but honestly, it made so much logical sense that I was surprised at the amount of space the story was given. Two entire pages top to bottom. WOW! Since, in my former life, I worked in the field of public relations, I know that rarely does a story like that get two entire pages unless it is an issue that truly hits home with people.
Now I am not going to rewrite the article here, you can read it on your own later. But think for a minute about how bad your days would be if you weren’t able to indulge in several hits of caffeine a day (something we would never allow our kids to do). Yet our kids need far more sleep than we do and we treat that sleep as optional.
The article links much of kids poor behavior on simply being too tired to deal with life. So, I ask you, how much sleep are your kids getting? Now, I can almost hear you saying to me that it isn’t your fault that the kids don’t get enough sleep. Between church on Wed nights, cub scouts, hockey, music lessons and ballet there isn’t enough time to sleep! Or maybe you believe that Johnny doesn’t need more sleep, he needs less because he is bouncing off the walls at bedtime. You might be surprised to find out that this is a classic sign of being completely over tired.
For those of you who have attended my classes or are familiar with Love and Logic, you may wonder how the concept of getting your kids more sleep jives with the Love and Logic concept of not being able to control when your kids sleep. The principle stays the same. No matter how hard you try, you cannot force your kids to sleep. What you can do, is increase the amount of time that they are spending in their rooms at night ready to sleep. You can decrease the amount of stimulation they receive prior to bedtime. You can remove the distracting toys out of their rooms.
You know what else you can do? Take a deep breathe, this one is harder to stomach. You can refuse to enroll your kids in activities that keep them up past their bedtimes. Look for activities that allow kids to meet after school or on the weekends when rest isn’t at such a premium. You can make sure that your family time after dinner isn’t translating into stolen sleep time. And you can make getting enough sleep a bigger priority in your home than learning to play the piano.
And who knows, maybe in addition to getting your kids caught up on their sleep, you’ll be able to get caught up on yours. And wouldn’t that be a marvelous thing?
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