It’s no secret that most parents will do almost anything to get
their child to go to sleep. Endless cups of water. Monster checks.
Sing-a-longs. ANYTHING.
It’s no secret that most parents will do almost anything to get their child to go to sleep. Endless cups of water. Monster checks. Sing-a-longs. ANYTHING.
Then there are those parents who have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s because they have the kind of child who trots off to bed at 7:15 every night, after brushing their teeth and kissing everyone goodnight. There’s no use in even trying to tell these people that in order to get your child asleep last night you had to sing all seven chorus of, “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” with hand actions before reading aloud “The Fuzzy Bunny” 27 times. They will just look at you with the same sort of horrified stare usually reserved for naked people running down the street.
As I understand it, most of the bedtime angst in this world is caused by one thing: The Deal. And by that I don’t mean the Donald Trump buy-up-all-of-the-stock-then-take-over-the-company kind of deal. I mean the other, more complicated kind that goes something like, “If I get you 16 glasses of water and read ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ 37 times while playing the part of the big, bad wolf, then will you go to sleep, oh, pretty please?”
Once I negotiated a deal with my daughter that she would go to bed if I let her hold a special wet washcloth she named Gerty. Another night, she cuddled with an apple from the fruit bowl. And another time she swore that she positively couldn’t rest until I put on the hula skirt from last Halloween and did the chicken dance.
One of the problems with The Deal is that it’s a process so intricate and precise that varying one tiny thing can call the whole thing off and you have to start over.
Take my friend Judy, for example. One night her 2-year-old daughter insisted on going to bed holding two Mylar butterfly balloons that she had gotten that afternoon from a well-meaning, childless aunt.
Of course, on the surface, there’s nothing wrong with this. And it would’ve probably been fine except for the fact, when she went to bed, she insisted on taking off the string and holding onto the neck of the balloons.
Needless to say, just as she was about to doze off, they’d slip out of her hands and float up to the vaulted ceiling. And everybody knows that there’s nothing like the sound of balloons gently wafting through the air to cause an almost-sleeping child to suddenly become fully alert and sit bolt upright in bed. So Judy did what any sleep deprived, desperate parent would do: climb up a ladder and give the balloons back.
And that’s what she did. Over and over again until, due to a miraculous turn of good luck, her daughter finally fell asleep before noticing she had let them go.
But there’s another danger of The Deal that no one warns you about: Once you stick to it more then three nights in a row, it officially becomes a routine.
And every parent knows that the thing about bedtime routines is that they don’t go away, they just get longer. And longer.
If you don’t believe me, just ask my friend Julie. At first, in order for her son to go to bed he needed a glass of water in his special cup. By all standards, it was a reasonable request. But then he needed a little orange juice added for “color.” Then some ice. And then a red, bendable straw. Before she knew it, he was up to three ice cubes, two maraschino cherries, and a paper umbrella. Then he insisted on singing Frank Sinatra songs.
“It’s like watching a really bad Vegas show,” she told me one day over coffee. “I’m not sure how we got to this point.” Her voice trembled slightly.
There’s no easy explanation for this. It’s a mystery. There’s something about bedtime that charges kids with boundless energy.
Whatever it is, amazingly enough, it goes away when they’re teenagers.
Suddenly, they’ll get up from the sofa, stretch, and wander off sleep without your help.
But then you won’t be able to get them out of bed in the morning.
