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NEW - No More Bedtime Battles No More Bedtime Battles
from The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers & Preschoolers
(McGraw-Hill) by Elizabeth Pantley
We parents today
have demanding schedules, and we juggle multiple tasks all day long. There’s
too much to do, and never enough time to do it. The bedtime routine often gets
slotted as one more “thing to do” after which we can get on to yet another task
on our never-ending to-do list.
I’d like to present
you with a new way of looking at your child’s bedtime routine: as a wonderful
opportunity for a nightly ritual of quiet connection and bonding. Sort of like
a forced savings account – a daily slice of time out of a busy day, given to
you so that you can bask in the joys of parenthood and build the foundation for
a close lifetime relationship. Pretty heady stuff, when you look at it this
way, isn’t it?
Simply said, you must get your child ready for bed each
and every night. The time will be
spent, one way or another. Would you like it to be peaceful, nurturing and
bonding – or rushed and stressful? You have the power to set the tone of your
evenings, so why not choose a pleasant routine? You will enjoy it more, and
your child will no longer resist bedtime –won’t that be marvelous!
Begin your routine earlier
If you are starting
your child’s bedtime routine fifteen or twenty minutes before you’d like him to
be asleep, it will inevitably create problems. This provides barely enough time
for the essentials, little time for pleasure, and no time at all for the
inevitable dawdles and delays. As a parent, you’re watching the clock move
forward, stressing over the time, and trying to rush things along. Your child,
who senses your tension and feels pressured, reacts by dawdling, or fashioning
new requests that simply must be met,
but of course, there’s no time, so a meltdown occurs. Following this pattern,
night after night, makes both parent and child dread bedtime, further
increasing the stress, and making things even worse. So goes the cycle, from
bad to worse, night after night.
The answer is to
avoiding all this turmoil is to allow plenty of time for the pre-bed routine.
For most families this means allocating at least an hour from the time the
process begins to lights out. While an hour or more may seem like a lot to
spend on a bedtime routine, most families with struggles end up spending more time than this dealing with a fussy
child who won’t cooperate. And said fussy child gets so worked up that once in
bed he’s wide awake and takes a long time before nodding off.
Decide in advance on
the best bedtime for your child, and then identify a specific time that you
will begin the getting ready for bed routine. You may have to work backwards
from this time to be sure that dinner and post-dinner activities are completed
by the time you wish to start your pre-bed plan.
Once you understand
the power of a long-enough routine to ward off the problems, and if you look at
this time as an opportunity to spend some peaceful time connecting with your
sweet child, then this hour can be something wonderful to look forward to each
night.
Excerpted with permission by
McGraw-Hill Publishing from The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers &
Preschoolers (McGraw-Hill) by
Elizabeth Pantley http://www.pantley.com/elizabeth
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