Bed time has always been difficult in my house. Although my wife and I have set bed times for each of our three children and try to strictly enforce the bed time, it is becoming a fiasco. It starts off with complaints from my youngest son that his brother gets to stay up longer than he does. It continues with a debate on which pajamas each child should wear. Then we have to go through the teeth brushing fight (my youngest son hates brushing his teeth, don’t ask me why because I simply don’t know). Even after everyone is ready for bed, we still have to go through process of getting backpacks ready for the morning, cleaning up the messes that have accumulated during the day, and bed time stories. My daughter is the only one who gets stories before bed anymore, but my youngest son likes to read in his bed before lights out, and my oldest is supposed to read before bed, he rarely does.
Honestly, most nights the kids are getting into bed thirty minutes past the stated bed time (of course homework complicates the matter and my oldest is usually still working on homework when he should be going to bed), which I could live with if my kids actually stayed in bed. Invariably though, they have to get up for something: a hug and a kiss (which they have already gotten before they went to bed), to ask a question, to go to the bathroom (although they went before bed), to get a drink of water. They find countless excuses to get up out of bed and come and check in with my wife and me.
It really is getting ridiculous. They are all tired, they all need to be getting more sleep, and they all find an “excuse” to get up out of bed each night, every night. Although my wife and I are quick to get them back into bed and give them consequences for getting up out of bed, nothing seems to stop the steady stream of visitors we get each night. Even after the kids have gone to sleep and my wife and I have crawled into bed, there is no guarantee that we won’t have a visitor. My youngest son often suffers from night terrors, and my daughter has is habit of getting out of bed, climbing the stairs, waking us up in the middle of the night to tell us she needs to go to the bathroom, even though the bathroom is next door to her room and she can just go without waking us up.
Seriously, I need help. I am tired, literally tired because I can’t seem to get enough sleep with all the late night visits and I am getting desperate.
I need to know: How do you keep your children in bed?