James Lileks is having problems getting Gnat to stay in her room and go to sleep.
This magic dust stuff isn’t working. Little Miss Peripatetic was up a half-dozen times last night. I’d leave my studio and find her standing in the hall like something from a spooky movie where the Sensitive, Preternaturally Attuned Child recognizes that the minions of hell are swirling around the house. I’d guide her back to bed, explain why she had to sleep, get a solemn assurance that she would indeed float off on the tides of Lethe, and I’d go downstairs. As soon as I was under her room I’d hear the little feet hit the floor above. Repeat until dawn.
Yeah, I hear that. It’s still a constant struggle between Us and Kitten. We wheedle. We kiss. We cajole. We harangue. We look sad. We exact promises. We tell her we’ll lock her door. We actually do lock the door (more on that in a bit).
Makes no difference. If she can exit her room, come down the stairs, peer at life in the family room from the landing, toddle further down and greet us with joy and happiness, then she will.
She seems to clearly understand that Mommy & Daddy don’t care for this behavior. She knows she’ll be punished. There doesn’t seem to be anything she wants in particular, except to be up, to be with us, to watch TV, and to not go to sleep.
Rrg.
Margie and I agree that Katherine will not be one of those kids who gets to stay up until they fall asleep. Not good for the kid, not good for the parents.
But I’m growing uncomfortable with locking her in her room. Too many whispery echoes of child abuse stories come to mind. I feel uncomfortable saying it’s something we do.
(Usual mode: we give her a bath, we put her to bed, we read her a story, we say good night, we go downstairs, she gets up in between one and sixty minutes, she toddles downstairs, we chide her and take her back up, we repeat the last three steps between one and five times before we lock the door, we eventually go to bed, we unlock her door on the way so she can get up in the morning and come say hi to Mommy and/or Daddy.)
Rrg.
We’ve tried to teach her if there’s something she wants, she can knock on her door. She does this. Sometimes.
We’ve tried leaving the door open a crack, so that she doesn’t feel the need to test it to see if it’s open. She only complains that it’s “too loud” and she comes downstairs anyway.
I don’t mind that she’s not immediately drifting off. I do mind that she’s not staying in her room.
And, yes, she’s only almost-three. But I still worry about warping her. (“You see, doctor, they used to lock me in my room! It was horrible!”) And I think that 7-7:30p is a perfectly reasonable bed time for her, since she gets up these days at 6a or so, and only intermittently takes naps.
Ah, for the days of laudanum …
Just kidding. But I’d settle for some magic dust that worked.
Ah heck, just being my daughter will be sufficient to warp my little girl beyond hope of recovery. We shut the door on her. She cried for the first few nights, and fell asleep on the floor a few times, but after awhile she went back to her bed and fell asleep. Now she stays in bed.
I recall growing up and sharing a room with my older and younger brothers. My younger brother wouldn’t stay in bed, either, and he learned how to open the door. Eventually my parents attached a hook-and-eye to the outside and locked us in every night. They’d unlock it again after my brother fell asleep…usually.
Come to think of it, that DOES explain a few things…
Though I’m not a parent, I do have to agree. She wins every time she gets up and comes downstairs, even if she goes right back to bed.
I wasn’t very good putting clothes away when I was little and my grandmother started picking up items that were not put away and hiding them. It came as a rude awakening when I had almost no clothes to wear. She returned them to me one at a time, and I got to keep things that I put away. Pretty smart for an old lady.
*knock wood* Anne & I haven’t had that kinda problem with Will. We don’t have a lock on his door, put we do have a sock over the handle which makes it difficult for him to get out. He can get out if he really wants to, but about 98% he figures its not worth it. He does know how to turn on the lights and read and play for a bit, be he is usually content to yell for us a couple of times before dozing off.
I agree about keeping a consistant bedtime. Will goes to bed between 7:30-8:00p. Depending on the previous days activities, he gets up around 7a. Sometimes even 8:30!
Now if he would just use the potty…..Any ideas?
Katherine is using the potty just great … at pre-school. At home, it’s a hit-or-miss thing. It’s not that she doesn’t know the signs or anything, we just haven’t come up with the right motivator to have her drag herself away from the TV or stuffed animals or whatever she’s doing at the time at home.
My parents used to use the “Go to bed, dammit!” method. Well — maybe that was later, I don’t really remember being very young. All I know is, the problem with me has always been getting me out of bed.
I suppose the reverse case was when, as a child (I would have been around 6-7), I was torqued that my folks put me to bed instead of letting me stay up to watch Star Trek (TOS). So I locked the hall door (which had a lock from the bedroom side of things, courtesy of the previous occupants) and went fast to sleep.
My folks rapping on the windows did not wake me, but it did wake my younger brother, who, at 4 years old, had to find something to climb on to get to the lock …
Benadryl.
It’s the one thing that worked with my kids on the nights following a “Little Johnny Jump Up” night.
Gggrrrr……is right. Frustrating.
When my daughter was about 3 we had similar issues. Each day seemed to end with a punishment because she wouldn’t stay in her room. We put up a baby gate. She couldn’t get out, but for some reason because she could open the door when she needed to this became a reasonable compromise.
The gate goes up after the last bedtime kiss and goes down when my spouse and I go to bed. She can holler if she needs to go potty or wants more water but can put herself to sleep in her bed alone.
There were some nights when she fell asleep on the floor, usually in the middle of some very organized party with her stuffed animals but those were mostly in the summer when it wasn’t quite dark at bedtime.