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Bedtime--And the Very Outcomes We Were Hoping to Avoid
By: Miriam Bellamy, LMFT
Hal Runkel, author of ScreamFree Parenting, teaches parents that our greatest enemy in parenting is not drugs, peer pressure, or the internet. Our greatest enemy is our own emotional reactivity. He says that our emotional reactivity creates the very outcomes we are hoping to avoid. In some ways this seems obvious – like if we lunge for our child when she is in physical danger. If we lunge when she is about to cross the street when a car is coming we actually increase the likelihood of her running or falling into the street. But there are ways our emotional reactivity creates the very outcomes we are trying to avoid that don’t seem so obvious.
Probably the most common situation when this occurs is when we just want our children to go to bed independently – or at least more independently than they do now! Getting your younger kids to bed is like entering some kind of twilight zone. It’s dark. It’s just plain nonsensical and weird. And you may even hear strange music. It can actually be one of the most frustrating times of the day. Everyone is tired, including you, and you’re ready to be done for the day, but your child seems to need you even more. In fact, the more you need him to just settle down and go to bed the more he seems to whine or cling or beg for things. As your frustration grows you hear yourself saying (maybe even screaming) things like, “Just go to sleep!” as if anyone can go to sleep when it is being demanded of them. Or “I’ve been with you all day and we’ve played and had fun and I’m done!” as if their resisting going to sleep has something to do with whether you were enough for them during the day. Or “Why can’t you just settle down?!” ignoring the fact that our increasing frustration actually pressures our children to interact with us even more.
Here’s what I mean. If you think of emotional reactivity as a storm – a cyclone – you realize the more you blow the more your children are caught in the chaos that seems to be demanding a response from them. The more we need them to say yes the more pressure they feel to say no. It is their immature way of holding onto solid ground - to hold on to some semblance of a self – to withstand your storm. None of us like to be ordered around no matter how old we are.
Instead, explore ahead of time what kind of a bedtime you want with your kids. Parenting really is all about you, as Hal teaches, and you get to create the kind of bedtime, meal time and overall home time you are going to have. But first you must realize that the only thing you have any say so over is your own behavior. How much time are you willing to spend? 10 minutes? 20? More? What time do you really need to start that process in order to get everyone to bed on time and still have an evening for yourself? Are you procrastinating each night? How do you really want to spend bedtime with your children? What activities or non-activity is required to achieve that end? If you’re lying in there with them seething and counting the seconds until it’s over with, you’re children are picking this up and they are going to react. How do you want to leave them for the night regardless of whether they are “happy” about you going? Do you want to walk out like you’ve just escaped prison – sneaking, guilty and angry – or do you want to walk out of their rooms on principle. ‘It’s time for Mommy to go now.’ No justifications or caving in or anger. Simply, ‘It’s time for me to go.’ And now, it’s time for me to go get the kids off the bus!
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