Bedtime stories: How to get your children to go to sleep

Getting your kids to go to sleep at the end of the day can be hard at the best of times. Photo / Getty

Greg Bruce ponders his children’s bedtime routine and dreams of a zombie apocalypse.

Every parent knows that more of their lifeforce is sucked from them between the hours of 5pm and whenever their kids finally go to sleep than at any other time in their life.

Yes, the half hour before they have to leave each weekday is also an unbelievable horror show, but, bedtime still has primacy.

The resistance, the difficulty of getting them to do each of the steps involved in a task seemingly as simple as brushing their teeth, combined with the lowering of your emotional and psychological defences after another exhausting day in the trenches, means the chances of some sort of disaster or meltdown, probably your own, are close to 100 per cent.

Before becoming a parent, you know about the perils of bedtime and sleep of course, but only in an abstract way, from other parents’ light-hearted stories about their experiences with their own kids.

When that abstraction assumes physical form in the shape of your own offspring, all the lightness of heart disappears, crushed in the difficulty of bedtime and the awareness that this will be your life for many years to come.

One of the key contributing factors to your children’s bedtime behaviour, and the one most like to eventually break you, is bedtime anxiety.

If like me, you have ever sat in a darkened bedroom for up to 90 minutes every night for several years, waiting for your children to stop talking, you’ll know that there comes a point where you wonder if there’s a better way.

When I asked psychologist and manager of Triple P NZ Jackie Riach about how to help an anxious child with bedtime in such a way that you no longer need to be sat on a beanbag on the floor of their room with their head on your lap for extended periods, she said there are three main approaches:

The first is the gentle approach.

This involves sitting in the room while they go to sleep, but not sitting near them, not making eye contact, not holding their hand, or having their head in your lap or any of that sort of carry-on, and definitely not responding when they try to engage you in conversation about the sounds characters make when they respawn in Roblox.

The second approach – the gradual approach – requires you to leave the room, which, if you have neglected taking action for as many years as I have, may feel terrifying.

The idea is that you tuck your child in and let them know you’ll return in two minutes. When you return after two minutes, comfort them and let them know you’ll be back in four minutes. And so on, adding slightly more time between each visit until they’re asleep.

The third approach involves going cold turkey: Putting your kid to bed and staying away.

If they come out, you put them back to bed, give them a kiss and leave again, until they’re asleep.

Riach says the approach you choose depends a little bit on your own feelings about what’s right for you and your child.

“You’ve got to work out what’s your goal here and that’s really about you and your wife having that conversation: ‘Is this the goal that we’re committed to, which we want to achieve?’ And, if it is, decent strategies for doing that, and if it’s not, then you may choose to continue doing what you’ve been doing.”

I liked this comment a lot, because it differed from every other piece of parenting advice I’d ever received.

If you’ve ever brought up your child’s bedtime anxieties at a social occasion, you’ll have felt the windy rush of self-approving advice from those who have heard the term “sleep training” and are now world leaders in its implementation in families they know nothing about.

But, as my wife said the other night, when I told her I wanted my 90 minutes a night back: “I don’t mind it. It’s sweet.”

I feel that sweetness too, and know I’ll miss it in a few years when the kids are spending all weekend swearing at us.

But the other side of the coin is that 90 minutes in the kids’ room is 90 minutes we’re not spending with each other, reconnecting and re-establishing ourselves as a couple, or – more realistically – watching hit series The Last of Us on Neon.

As much as I love my children and want to spend time with them, I know how important it is for my own mental health and the family as a whole that I also have plenty of time left over to engage with the zombie apocalypse.