Our daughter has a bedtime routine. She will go to bed happily and stay there all night. On a good day she won’t get up until about 7am. On a bad day she’s up at 4am, on average she gets up somewhere between 5 and 6.
This was not something achieved without significant effort on our part. For over 2 years we fought tooth and nail until we found the right combination of naps, activities and routine to make it work. The key is to tailor the process to what works for you and your family and don’t alter it. There are timeframes and certain chores that must be done at set times and then stay rigidly consistent. Before deciding to start instigating a bedtime routine, sit down with a planner or a notepad and map out your week. Anything that happens in that week that absolutely cannot be moved fill in first. That includes such things as jobs / school / regular medical or therapy appointments etc. Next spend some time noting when your child gets tired in the evening, and is ready to be put to bed for the night. NOT when you want to put them to sleep, but when they actually sleep. If this is later than 10pm, then you need to consider shifting or eliminating their last nap of the day.
Once you have an idea of when you want to get your child in bed, you can work backwards. You want your evening routine to be consistent, regardless of whether it is term time or not. Consider that at some point, your child will be attending school, or factor in other children in the house already of school age. You may want to start sleep training during the summer holiday, when sleep deprived older siblings can catch up with lie ins, but that is entirely up to you.
Next make sure the room you are putting your fae into is conducive to sleep. Temperature should be ideally between 16 – 20°C: this may be harder to attain in summer. We actually bought air conditioning units to keep the rooms cool, but this is a luxury that a lot of people cannot afford. A standalone AC unit can be noisy and cost a few hundred pounds. To get integrated AC cost us the best part of £5000. I don’t regret a penny of it, but it is a lot of money, and not an option for a lot of people. You can get a good effect by using fans and placing a bag of ice in front of them (put a tray under the ice to catch run off) or spritzing curtains with water and using a fan to cool them. Ceiling fans are also a cheaper option but require a certified electrician to install them.
Temperature is a significant factor in getting your child to sleep easily. Our daughter can sleep through any noise – we used to walk her around the town in a chest sling to get her to sleep, and even sirens wouldn’t wake her. But being too warm would definitely do it. It’s also very dangerous for young children to overheat. Too hot is significantly more dangerous than too cold: children can snuggle up with bedding for warmth, and are likely to wake if they are too cold, whereas they can fall into a coma and suffer heat related illnesses when too hot.
Try to keep the room calm; keep the décor from being over stimulating; flashing and beeping toys should not be in their rooms overnight – this is a place to sleep, not play. Place loud and exciting toys elsewhere; a playroom or family room. They can, of course, have their favourite stuffed toys (our daughter has the entire Paw Patrol and, at last check, a couple of Octonauts had snuck in) but if it lights up, talks, blinks, beeps or has at any point made me want to launch it out the nearest window, it does not go in her bedroom.
Her room is painted in bland white and off-white shades; her duvet sets are mostly beige with a few characters from books or dinosaurs on them. Bright colours are for other places. It’s deliberately dull: there aren’t even any sheep to count because for her that would be too exciting – she loves numbers.
We spent several weeks planning how to tackle her sleep routine before starting, and once we began we didn’t stop. Commitment is key: if you show signs of weakness, they will sense it. We figured out that 8pm was the sweet spot – the time where she was mostly tired, without being so tired that she went manic. We worked out that baths excited her too much to be the last thing she does before bed, so our bedtime routine started when my husband stopped work. He has half an hour to play with her. They may go in the garden and throw a ball around, or just chill out watching TV and building forts in the living room while I prepare her dinner (apart from when her dad cooks). We eat at around 6:30, and by “we” I mean her father and myself eat. She will sit on the bench opposite and may or may not join us: she has a troubled relationship with food that makes it difficult to predict. I rarely make her anything unfamiliar, there is always something she likes on her plate. If she eats, I sigh in relief and internally dance for joy. If she doesn’t, I will try to hide my disappointment. It’s no good coercing or begging, it doesn’t work.
We always finish the meal by offering her a yoghurt and asking her if she wants ‘anything else’: this is to encourage her verbal skills. She normally counts to 3 to indicate she would like three chocolate buttons. She has been known to try it on, and count to ten with a cheeky grin, but she knows that three ( if she eats really well, 4) is the best she can hope for. After which we wipe her face and hands regardless of whether she needs it (it’s a signpost that she can leave the table) and head to the bath. She has recently got into the habit of brushing her own teeth, although much to my lament I have to sing ‘baby shark’ while she does it. If I stop singing, she stops brushing. Still life is about compromise. By the time the bath is full (and I have caterwauled through the last do-do-do) she is ready to get in. Bath time is also used to encourage language by naming body parts as she smashes a sponge into them: she tries to wash them herself but often needs a little help. Drying her off is most often achieved by chasing her around the bathroom while she hides under the towel pretending to be a ghost.
My husband will clear up from dinner at this point, while I create monstrosities from Lego with her, or complete jigsaws. At about 7:45pm we all curl on the couch and read from a selection of books. Her favourites are an illustrated version of “Rhyme of the ancient mariner” and Poe’s “The Raven” – both were bought as a bit of a joke, but she loves them. By 8 she is normally asleep or very close to. She has a signpost book, ‘Roaring Rockets’: we use it to say “time to sleep”, she uses it to indicate she wants to go to bed. Either way it’s the last book of the night. We then carry her to bed (when we started this, she was a lot lighter!) Originally, this was where the trouble started.
She would be fine until we had kissed her goodnight and left room. At which point she would spring to life and throw herself out of bed to follow us. We sometimes spent literally hours putting her back in bed, while she went through the gamut of emotions from laughter to tears to full out-rage. We would start at 8 and she might be asleep by 10. Some nights we were still fighting her at midnight. Only for her to wake up at 2 and start the whole thing again. I wanted to cry (I did often). Eventually (by that I mean after about 6 months of this) she stayed in bed mostly, but screamed and cried every time we left. We kept going in: we didn’t keep to the recommended “leave her 5 mins”, I was physically unable to leave her that long and frankly it seemed cruel. We began with a maximum of 20 seconds before going back in. The important thing was to settle her and leave. It didn’t matter how long for. We went through this phase for a long time too.
Finally we got to the point where we could put her to bed and she would stay and go to sleep without tears (yay), but if she woke at night she would still need the same amount of pain to get her down again. I caved: I was exhausted from this, so if she woke at night, I started bringing her through to my bed to sleep. Which marked me as a soft touch and probably prolonged the process. In my mind, I didn’t want her waking her father – who had to work then next day – with her cries.
It reached the point where we had to bite the bullet and go through the same rigmarole at 2am as we had at 8. That almost broke us, I think on my own I wouldn’t have managed it. I don’t know how anyone does. The only thought that kept us fighting was that we felt the need to crack this NOW, so as not to be still having this fight when she was 5 or 10. We got a gro-clock (these things can be magic) and informed her she had to stay until the clock face went from blue to yellow. This does two things: 1. It gives her a night light; and 2. The countdown and colour change is a clear boundary, she can rage at it not us; after all it’s not our fault, it’s that silly clock – because rules.
All in all it took just over 2 years. It’s not perfect and even this morning she was up at 5 but she stayed in her own bed until 6.
So TL;DR:
• Decide on the routine that fits you and your family
• Begin the routine at the same time each day
• Turn off all tech well before bed
• Calm activities like reading or jigsaws as a wind-down activity
• Get a gro-clock (link below)
• STICK TO YOUR ROUTINE
• Accept it will take time, potentially years
• Have a support network: you can’t do this on your own.
So with that said, I’m still exhausted so while my fae is with a childminder I’m off for a nap!
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Raising the Modern Fae 