Can I Put My Child to Bed Early so I Can Watch Game of Thrones?
Game of Thrones returns on Sunday. You have the ingredients to make Old Fashioned Crow , your bowl of gruesome wolf food for a snack, and your cheat sheet on who wants to kill, whose family, and why. Now all you need is for your kids to go to bed so you can learn what winter brings with it into the world.
Fortunately, the show airs at 9:00 pm ET, and most young children go to bed early. But West Coasters like me can watch it live at 6pm using the streaming service. Out of curiosity, I wondered what might happen if parents tried to put their children to bed early, say at 5:58 pm, because it often seems that no matter what time they go to bed, they always wake up at the same time. : are-you-freaking- kidding -me -o’clock. Is it okay to put my child to bed on a special occasion – for example, for the season premiere? Would that disrupt their body routines forever?
I asked Alexis Dubiev , an expert on children’s sleep and author of the new book, Precious Dream . She laughed and thought that my question was a joke, and then I also laughed awkwardly, and then she realized that I was serious. And then she gave me a thoughtful answer. This is what she told me:
“Most kids don’t go to bed at six. If your goal is to put them to sleep by six, chances are you won’t succeed. This is probably the bad sleep duju, and the reason the bad sleep duju is because your body has a circadian rhythm that thrives on regularity, so if you lengthen your bedtime you are basically asking your child to have change of time zones. You are trying to get them to fall asleep at a time when their body is not used to sleep, and worse, when you reschedule their sleep times earlier, it’s like daylight savings time and they haven’t been awake long enough to accumulate significant sleep deprivation. so that they can fall asleep and sleep.
So even if you manage to persuade your 2-year-old to go to bed an hour earlier – or an hour and a half earlier, since most kids stay awake until 7:30 – which would be a Herculean task in itself, you are at really high risk. that they will either a) wake up often at night because they are not tired enough before bed, or b) start the next day at five o’clock in the morning. morning or c) all of the above. If Game of Thrones is on at six, I recommend TiVo, or since this is HBO, you know they’ll be showing it about 10 times, so just go later. But stay away from the internet because there will be spoilers everywhere. “
That’s it: you probably shouldn’t put your child to bed too early so you can watch Game of Thrones live from the West Coast. Not that I was ever going to try …