Early to Bed, Early to Rise? Maybe Not
Posted by Danielle Bean in Family on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 10:30 AM
I thought yesterday’s Coffee Talk discussion about family bedtimes and Arwen’s ongoing discussion of sleepless babies made for some very interesting reading.
Bedtimes are something I’ve thought about a lot in recent years.
You see, we used to be a 7:30 pm bedtime kind of family. I loved that!
But then those grade school kids we were so fond of pushing around had the nerve to grow up into middle-sized and even-bigger kids ... who needed less sleep.
So we instituted “quiet time” in the early evening hours. The bedroom lights could stay on past 7:30, but all kids need to be in their beds engaged in some quiet activity—reading, writing, or drawing.
Shared bedrooms, though, means that everyone—even the preschoolers—stays up until the lights go out at about 9:30 most weeknights, and later still on weekends.
In the summertime, the combination of late day sunshine, relaxed schedules, and big boys who stay out fishing until very late several nights a week means that most kids around here stay up very late as a matter of habit. We keep this relaxed summertime schedule until the fall when school and work schedules force us up earlier in the morning.
I know that I could put little kids in their beds earlier and insist that they stick to a stricter sleeping schedule, but the truth is that I don’t feel the need to be more rigid about bedtimes at this point in my life. My two littlest boys nap in the day if they need to and shared rooms and bedtimes simplify our nightly routines.
There are some times when little kids get crabby and I become convinced they are lacking sleep and so we enforce naps or earlier bedtimes. But on the whole, our relaxed approach to bedtime works for us.
I see this as our current stage in the natural process of large family evolution. I suppose teenagers staying out late and big kids coming home from college will further “upset” our bedtimes in the not too distant future.
What do bedtimes look like in your house? And how have they changed over the years?
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