Winning the battle of the bedtime!

If it is also difficult to wake your child in the morning, ". . . establish a long and gentle wake-up routine," says Lynne Embry, Ph.D. Start an hour before your child really needs to get out of bed. Cover her with another blanket to raise her body temperature. Play music, and turn up the volume every fifteen minutes. Give her a glass of juice to raise her blood-sugar level. Dr. Anthony J. LaPray, in Help for Parents, says resistance going to bed is caused by a desire to manipulate or get attention from parents.

He says nagging, threatening, spanking, and scolding won't work. Even negative attention will be a reward to the child. "If you give a child attention or power," says Dr. LaPray, "the behaviour will continue. If you damage the self-image, more serious problems will develop." Instead, Dr. LaPray says you should allow children to lie in bed and read or play quietly. Be sure to give praise when they cooperate at bedtime. According to Dr. LaPray, "If the issue of sleep loses its power to upset parents, children will get the sleep they need."

In Answers: A Parents' Guidebook for Solving Problems, Dr. Paul W. Robinson also supports the theory that even negative attention will inspire children to keep putting up a struggle at bedtime.

He says, "When a child misbehaves, it is because such actions produce some positive satisfaction for him." Dr. Robinson is an advocate of the extinction method. This means that the misbehaviour will stop if you remove the pay-off that resulted from the misbehaviour in the past. Dr. Robinson says, "A child's desire to misbehave will fade when five to ten repeats of that behaviour fail to produce a pay-off."

If your child wails and whines when you put her to bed until you come back to read her one more story, or until you let her come back out to the TV room for an extra half-hour, you need to change your behaviour if you ever hope to have your child respect her bedtime. If you stop responding in the way you have in the past, after five to ten times, your child will decide resisting bedtime is no longer worth the effort. It takes a time, patience, and persistence, but if you use the extinction method consistently, it is one of the most effective methods for stopping misbehaviour.

Back to page 1