Make Your Child Stay in Bed With the Bedtime Pass
If you are not one of those lucky few parents whose young children live to sleep, you are probably in the same boat as the rest of us – staggering through the days in a fog of fatigue, but dreading the sunset as the clock starts ticking closer and closer to [ sinister music beep ] to sleep . Even if your kids don’t have trouble falling asleep, their problem may be getting to sleep. You expect to be greeted by a small, dark face several times a night.
Dear Mom and Dad, there is a scientifically proven solution to these sleep problems. This is a night pass .
How it works: You take a registration card and write [child’s name] “Night pass” on it. Decorate it with stickers, laminate shit out of it, but whatever you do, make it look official as hell. Toddlers can use this pass to go outside after sleeping if they really need it. They can trade it for an extra hug, or a sip of water, or share a deep thought, such as (as recently heard in our home) “I need to rearrange the furniture next week so my time capsule can land.” Whatever. Their only request to get out of bed should be complied with, but subsequent requests to leave the room in a non-emergency should be ignored. The magic behind this idea is that when you set clear boundaries, kids feel in control.
Night Skip, which has been particularly effective for preschool and primary school children, was first studied by Connie J. Schnous, a staff psychologist at the Boys Town Behavioral Health Center in Nebraska. NPR report :
Schnoes set up a pilot study with two boys, ages 3 and 10, and collected data from 20 parents and 23 pediatricians who assessed the acceptability of the bedtime intervention technique.
“Crying and going out of the bedroom dropped to zero in both children,” says a paper describing the study, published in October 1999 in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine . “The pediatricians rated skipping as significantly more acceptable than allowing children to sleep with their parents and tantamount to being ignored. The parents rated the pass as more acceptable than any other option. “
I tried the hack myself after a particularly memorable evening when our rebellious daughter, a budding Broadway star, screamed so loudly that the burglar alarm went off. (According to the security company, some of the screeching mimics the sound of breaking glass, and with her antics she touched the sensor on the window in her bedroom.)
As soon as we passed the Pass to our child, she began to leave the room less and played less. And since the struggle for power was over, it calmed down faster in the evening. Unlike spreadsheets with stickers, bribery, consequences, or reading Go to Night to Sleep , this technique works long after it was introduced.
Sometimes it takes a village to raise children. In other cases, all you need is an index card.