Bedtime

One of the most important skills you can teach your child is how to go to bed. The main reason bedtime is so important is that it’s very hard to be a good parent. The constant attunement, frustration management, limit-setting, and concern for your child’s well-being will grind you down. The only way to be a good parent all day long is to know when the day will end. If you know with a reasonable degree of certainty that the day will end at 7:30 sharp, it’s a lot easier to stay on top of your game right through 7:29. It’s hard to wear the mask of an interested student when the teacher lets the lesson drag on past the official end of class; it’s hard to wear the mask of appreciative audience when someone speaking in conversation outlasts the local cultural norms on how long you can talk uninterrupted. Any complex task that requires concerted effort is made easier if you know when you can stop.

Bedtime is important also because it teaches the child a key skill (falling asleep at a set time) for physical and mental health. Lack of sleep adversely affects physical and emotional functioning. The night before a job interview or a major surgery may be exceptional, but most nights ought to be taken in stride. This will not only endow your child with many good nights’ sleep for the health benefits, it will also teach your child that the bumps and potholes of life can be ridden out calmly. Sure, “rage against the dying of the light” in the metaphorical sense of living life fully up to the last minute, but not in the literal sense of staging protests against bedtime. Bedtime teaches children the invaluable lesson of living life as if it will last neither a week nor forever, but as if it will last for whatever your life expectancy is, an approach that fosters good decisions for the long haul. Staying up late makes good sense if you are likely to die tomorrow, and letting kids stay up late communicates that life is unreliable and short. If you expect to be alive for more than a few months, then the best strategy for a human is to get plenty of sleep, so as to fully enjoy wakefulness. A regular bedtime sets your child on the road to managing existential angst.

Children should sleep in their own beds. I recognize that poor people all over the world are sharing beds with children and calling it culture, just as places where meat is scarce treat vegetarianism as a kind of sacrament. If you can’t afford to give your children protein or their own beds, don’t beat yourself up over it; but if you can afford it, provide it. When children sleep with parents, they have to endure getting kicked out when the parents finally want to be alone again. Often, such parents get divorced and then don’t want to sleep without children again until they meet someone to sleep with instead. Do you really want to introduce your new partner to your child as the person who is taking his place? Children, like adults, get hazily and vaguely sexually excited while half asleep. Do you really want to be lying in bed with your child while she’s turned on? Finally, children who can’t go to sleep on their own are not welcome for overnights at other people’s houses, and they become aware that there is something creepy about their sleeping arrangements at home. Spare them this.

The three big maltreatment areas are abuse, neglect, and spoiling. Abuse occurs when parents lack skills and become frustrated by their ineffectiveness. They attack children like someone not knowing how to work a Coke machine attacks the machine. Neglect occurs when parents put their own needs ahead of important needs of their children. Bedtime protects against abuse and neglect because parents can regroup and meet their own needs once the little maniacs are down for the night. Spoiling is a special version of neglect in which the parental need to avoid immediate conflict outstrips concern for the child’s long-term adjustment. The parent’s reasons usually involve a lack of skills (they don’t know how to put a child to bed or they don’t understand the importance of exercising authority consistently); an explanatory belief that the child is unusually or especially clinging, demanding, or powerful (which lets the parents off the hook but dooms the child to be especially clinging, demanding, or powerful); or a horror over being cast as the bad guy (the authority, the bearer of reality). Generally, a parent who is extremely reluctant to be seen as the bad guy communicates to the child that the parent must really be harboring some violent thoughts about the child to make any insignia of villainy so toxic. Does the word “authority” remind you of spanking or teaching?

When life is fun, you sleep best when you sense that it will all be there tomorrow waiting for you. When life is scary, you sleep best when you know that you’ll be safe. Either way, you need someone in charge who has things under control. A parent who can’t even organize a bedtime is not a parent to rely upon to make fun dependable or to keep monsters at bay. Children of such parents are worried at worst and at best they feel they have to grab all the goodies they can get.

Everything I’ve said here about bedtime can be applied to starting and ending psychotherapy sessions on time, where the immediate goal is taking off masks rather than getting a good night’s sleep.