Category: Couples Blog Posts

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.

A crucial skill in becoming a therapist, or a person, is to find out what another person’s experience has been like. Was an interpretation useful? Did she enjoy the dinner? What was it like for him when I came late?

Because we feel so privileged with respect to knowledge about our private affairs, and because we resent it as undignified if someone else presumes to tell us what we feel, we generally observe the social norms of tact and distance. We ask people what an experience was like for them instead of telling them. The person herself is in a good position to observe her emotional reactions and her thoughts, but she’s not exactly objective. Also, if there’s any sort of political, social, or economic agenda at play, she’s likely to distort her description to serve those needs. In other words, she won’t want to irritate you if you have power over her, and she won’t want to be seen as rude or to cost herself anything.

Even if she is completely committed to honesty, she can only be as good an observer and reporter of her emotions and reactions as she has learned to be. We learn to report our emotions as children by living with people who infer our emotions by observing us, and then they teach us the name of the emotion. If they see a child trying unsuccessfully to unwrap a piece of candy, they tell her she’s frustrated. (If they’re behaviorists, they tell her she’s in extinction, and then they wonder why their kids are so odd.) If they see her brother snatch the candy from her, they tell her she’s angry. Much later, when she tells you she’s frustrated that you started a session late (or showed up late for a dinner), she means that it’s like not being able to unwrap candy. If she tells you she’s angry, she means it’s like having something snatched away.

Many girls are not told that they are angry when something is snatched away. Many girls are told that they are tired. So if you are late and she tells you it’s not a big deal because she’s tired and can’t make a long night of it, what are you to make of that? Another problem is that we can only report our thoughts about what happened if we have had the experience of sharing our thoughts and finding that they are welcome. If certain kinds of thoughts are punished or rejected by parents, we will learn not to have them (or not to share them). We can only be as good reporters of our thoughts as we have learned to be.

Besides the assumption of shared vocabulary when asking someone how they experienced you or any other situation, another problem is that the vocabulary word (the name of the emotion) cannot possibly convey as much interesting and useful information as the analogy conveys. It would be much better if she told you, “It reminds me of my brother snatching my candy for some reason,” or, “It reminds me of not being able to unwrap Kisses.” That’s a point agreed on by psychoanalysts (“let’s see where your thoughts go from here”), behaviorists (verbal behavior is controlled, like any behavior, by discriminative stimuli and escapes punishment via metaphor) and systems theorists (patterns matter more than names of patterns).

So why not skip the step of asking? (Or, if necessary for politeness, ask from politeness but don’t overly credit the answer.) Instead, observe the other person—and get her talking. If our lateness was important to her, she is bound to respond to it, either by behaving differently or by communicating about it metaphorically. I call the former, theater, and the latter, poetry. She will show us or tell us all we need to know about her reactions, if only we are willing to listen. Of course, when the thing she is reacting to is some imperfection of ours, the last thing we want to do is listen. To want to do so, we need to have experience with the fullness and richness of relationships built on truthful mutuality. You can only get that with another person.

The next step is to stop asking ourselves what we think and feel. Instead, if we observe ourselves with an affectionate, challenging, sturdy, curious attitude, we can discover our own bits of theater and poetry and find out how we really feel about things and not be so subject to our master narratives and party lines. That’s called freedom.