The 1-2-3 Magic Workbook for Christian Parents: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12 (28 page)

Oh, for a good night’s sleep!

For many families, putting the kids to bed at night is a daily nightmare.

Although bedtime may technically be 9:00, at 10:30 the children

are still wandering around the house, asking for drinks, telling you they

heard a noise outside, wanting to play a game or going to the bathroom

for the twentieth time. This routine may be accompanied by a good deal

of arguing and screaming, which only serves to ensure that everyone will

stay awake to watch the late movie together.

Your work days are long enough as it is! With a little thought, this kind

of bad end to your evenings can be avoided. Many of our Start behavior

tactics can be used for bedtime. Put these strategies together and you have

the simple and wonderfully helpful Basic Bedtime Method (two-to-four-

year-olds will need a little extra help).

The Basic Bedtime Method

Before you can do anything else, you must set a bedtime for the kids and

stick to it.
The bedtime may vary, of course, depending on whether it’s

a school night or a weekend, or whether it’s during the school year or

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summertime. But exceptions to the rule should be rare. Otherwise, every

night bedtime is open for negotiation, which can lead to testing and ma-

nipulation, which in turn can lead to no one feeling like sleeping.

Let’s assume that you have a nine-year-old daughter, and you decide

that 9:00 will be the time for her to go to bed on a school night. The Basic

Bedtime method goes like this. At 8:30 you set a timer for 30 minutes

and tell the child that it’s time to get ready for bed. This means that the

youngster must do everything required to prepare for bed—on her

own—and then report to you. She must get her

Quik Tip…

pajamas on, brush her teeth, take a shower or

The Basic Bedtime bath and do whatever else you require. Be sure

Method will save to make the bedtime preparation list perfectly

you lots of aggravation clear. If your child is only two or three or four,

in the evenings. The first

you’ll have to help her get ready, but the same

requirement is that you

pick a bedtime—and stick rewards and consequences will apply.

to it! Bedtime cannot be

When the child has completed all the nec-

renegotiated every single

essary tasks, she reports to you. You make sure

night.

she accomplished everything she had to and then

praise the child for her efforts. Now comes the

reward. Whatever time is left between 8:30 and 9:00 is time for just the

two of you. You might sit on the bed to read a story or simply sit and talk.

Kids love this kind of one-on-one time with a parent. Make sure you stay

in the bedroom and don’t do anything overly exciting or energetic.

This special time serves three purposes. First, it is an immediate

reinforcer for the child’s independently doing a good job of getting ready

for bed. Second, the remaining minutes till 9:00 are a good opportunity

for you to spend a little quiet time together. With all of us so busy these

days, this kind of time is not easy to come by. And finally, these mo-

ments with you help the kids relax and get in the mood—physically and

mentally—for going to sleep. You certainly wouldn’t want the children

running around wildly right before they’re supposed to hit the sack.

If you have trouble coming up with an inventory of all that needs

to be done for the kids to get ready for bed, just think of all the things

the children usually tell you
they haven’t done
after they are
in bed
, and you’ll have the list right away.

BEDTIME AND NIGHTTIME WAKING 157

“I’m hungry.”

“I’m scared.”

“I need a drink.”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“These pajamas itch.”

“There’s a burglar in the basement.”

“The dog’s still outside.”

Etc., etc., etc. Every item on the list should be taken care of or

addressed before bedtime, even if the item isn’t perfectly rational.

One caution here. Don’t lie down on the bed. This has nothing to

do with anything Freudian. It just so happens that there is a biological

law that says: If you are over twenty-five years of age, and it’s past 8:00

in the evening, and you spend more than three minutes in a horizontal

position, you’re gone! You’ll be out like a light. And the kids will love

it. They’ll enjoy the comfort and novelty of having you sleeping next to

them, but they will also quickly get dependent on this arrangement and

start expecting—or demanding—the same thing every night.

And now, on to the grand finale of the Basic Bedtime Method. When

9:00 rolls around, tuck the child in, kiss her goodnight and leave the room.

You have just had a nice time with your youngster and your parenting job

is done for the day.

Right? Perhaps not. At this point some parents say, “How naive you

are; the kid is right behind me!” or “If I go down to the kitchen, she’s

sure to show up in less than three minutes wanting something.” What if

your daughter won’t stay in bed after 9:00?

Getting Out of Bed

Some kids just can’t seem to stay in bed after you tuck them in. You put

them down and they get up. While you try to go about your business, they

are always coming up with some new reason for getting out of bed.

When my son was eighteen months old, he climbed out of his crib

for the first time. My wife and I were sitting in the living room of our two

flat, relaxing and thinking the day was over, when in walked this cute little

kid, grinning from ear to ear, proud as punch that he had singlehandedly

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escaped from his crib for the first time in his life. As young parents, we

interpreted this event as the end of the known world. We had visions of

our little guy getting up at 3:00 in the morning, calling his friends on the

phone, roasting marshmallows on the gas stove, or worse.

In desperation—and forgetting temporarily that I was supposed to

be a clinical child psychologist—I found some

scrap lumber and some bailing twine and built

CAUTION

Never forget the sides of his crib up about a foot higher all the

one very

way around. The result was quite a contraption,

important fact: If a

and I wasn’t sure it would work.

child won’t stay in bed at

It didn’t. On the third night our boy figured

bedtime, the longer he is

up and the farther away he out a way to scale even these new heights and

gets from his bedroom,

once again escape. So we had to come up with

the more reinforcement he a new plan. Talking to an eighteen-month-old

will get from that activity.

would have been useless. Not only that, by now

Your job? Cut him off at

the pass.

our son considered get ing out of his crib as a kind

of exciting challenge. So my wife and I decided

that our only choice was to train him some way

to remain in bed—or at least in his bedroom.

We put a chair in the door to his room, and after all the bedtime

prep was done, one of us (we took turns) just sat in the chair, facing into

the hallway. We left the side of his crib down, because putting it up was

now useless. We said nothing after bedtime. If our son got out of bed,

we put him back in bed. We repeated this procedure and did our best to

stay calm. Sometimes we’d give up putting him back in bed, and he’d

just fall asleep on the floor. Then we’d cover him and leave, because if

we tried to pick him up he’d wake up.

After a week or two, he started staying in his bed and going to sleep.

What a relief! I think he actually found our nearby presence comforting,

even though we weren’t talking to him. In another week or so, we no

longer had to sit in the doorway. A couple of months later, our little lad

graduated to a junior bed and we never had any more problems.

The strategy for handling kids’ getting out of bed is based on a basic

psychological principle:
If a child gets out of bed after bedtime, the longer

he is out of bed and the longer he stays up, the more reinforcement he gets

BEDTIME AND NIGHTTIME WAKING 159

for this behavior.
And the more he will want to keep getting out of bed

in the future. The essential conclusion, therefore, is that you have to “cut

him off at the pass”—the doorway to the room. This tactic is certainly no

fun for mom or dad, but bedtime is no time for wishful thinking. Bedtime

is also no time for ridiculous conversations with little kids about why they

should stay in bed.

Just park yourself in a chair in the doorway—facing away from

the child. Bring a good book if you want. Don’t talk no matter what the

youngster says. If he gets out of bed and comes to you, take him gently

by the arm or pick him up and put him back.

If you have a child who is over five or six, you might be able to

use charting to encourage the youngster to stay in bed. There is a unique

problem, though, when it comes to charting bedtime. In general, rewards

and punishments are most effective when they are given out immediately.

If you are using charting with bedtime, however, you cannot tell the child

right away how he did, because if he does really well, he won’t be awake.

Therefore, there will be a long delay—till the next morning—before he

finds out how you rated him, and you may find that this delay reduces

the effectiveness of the charting procedure. In spite of this complication,

this particular Start behavior strategy may still be worth a try.

Nighttime Waking

Many children go through periods when they wake up at night and present

themselves at your bedside with some kind of vague request for assistance.

Some kids may get out of bed a dozen or more times per night, while

others will just make a little noise and then go back to sleep.

Nighttime problems are among the hardest to handle, because in the

middle of the night most parents aren’t quite in their right minds—and

neither are their kids. It can also be very aggravating to be awakened from

a sound sleep, and sleep deprivation itself can have a very bad effect on

your next day at work. Handling nighttime problems incorrectly can make

matters worse very rapidly, and the child’s waking can quickly become

more frequent and more traumatic for everybody.

When our daughter was seven, she went through a phase in which

she would appear at our bedside in the middle of the night. When we

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would ask what the problem was, she would say something nonsensical,

such as “The elephant ran away.” Of course, at 2:00 you’re not thinking

clearly either, so we would respond with something equally ridiculous,

such as “Well, where did he go?” These strange episodes went on for

several months until we worked out the nighttime waking procedure that

I’m about to describe.

Below are a number of steps that have proved to be effective in

responding to nighttime episodes. When these steps are carried out con-

sistently and calmly, most kids will get back to sleeping through the night

in a few weeks. Remember: If ever there was a time for our No-Talking

and No-Emotion rules, it’s in the middle of the night!