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From: whitehur@tymix.UUCP (Pamela K. Whitehurst)
Newsgroups: net.kids
Subject: Re: putting children to bed
Message-ID: <516@tymix.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 15-Sep-85 12:44:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: tymix.516
Posted: Sun Sep 15 12:44:00 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Sep-85 05:27:42 EDT
References: <3838@amdcad.UUCP>
Reply-To: whitehur@tymix.UUCP (Pamela K. Whitehurst)
Organization: Tymnet Inc., Cupertino CA
Lines: 43
Summary: 

In article <3838@amdcad.UUCP> linda@amdcad.UUCP (Linda Seltzer) writes:
>
>Why make the kid go to bed if he's not tired.  When he's tired he'll fall
>asleep anyway.  Plenty of parents are frustrated little dictators and the
>only way they can exercise power is to impose all kinds of arbitrary
>rules on their kids.  May parents used to make me go to bed early,
>I just turned on the lights after they fell asleep, and stayed up
>most of the night reading.  It never hurt me that I didn't sleep
>10 hours a night - good training for engineering school, actually.

Let's get the bed time and ages straight. Anyone old enough to read a book
that takes most the night is probably ready to find out the results of
their actions.  

At 13, my daughter does not have a 'bed time'.  She is
expected to stay in the house and be quiet at night, and she is not
allowed to use tiredness as an excuse for not doing her chores, or for
being disagreeable the next day.  She is allowed to sleep late or take a
nap if it is possible.

Until she was 12 she had a bed time.  I did not have trouble with "I'm not
tired", because she was tired.  I think that after going to bed at the
same time for so long, her body was conditioned to going to sleep by 9pm.
Sometimes she was the one to say "I'm tired, I'm going to go to bed."
(It was so cute coming from a five year old!)
She didn't complain much about "missing something"  either.  Her
bed time ritual involved a bath and then a story.  The books were always
beyond her reading ability and enjoyed.

The advantages of this approach were: she went to bed without complaint
because she wanted to, I had a special time with her each day, we both
found a lot of good books.

The biggest disadvantage was sometimes I didn't feel like spending the
time to read to her. Sometimes I could skip a night without her
complaining, but not for more than a couple days.

The bed time ritual stopped about the same time the official bed time did.
Occasionally she still asks me to read to her, and sometimes I do.
-- 

           PKW 
hplabs!oliveb!tymix!whitehur


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