Have a good bedtime routine.

Having a good bedtime routine means both at naptime and at night time. During a normal daycare day, I put eight kids down for a nap in four bedrooms. It is not a struggle. The kids actually cheer when I say it’s naptime. That’s because I make getting ready for nap a fun time.

I start by putting the kids down in shifts beginning with the youngest. Each child gets individual time from me which includes chatting and then tickle time. I start music for them and they go to sleep. None of them cry when I lay them down and it’s not very often that I go check on them that they’re not already sleeping. If I do check on them and they’re playing, I can tell them to lay back down and go to sleep. They do this because of my consistency and follow through on what happens when they don’t listen. They lose priviledges. Even young children who are napping age can under this concept.

And then comes evening bedtime. This process is probably much more of a challenge, but still very possible to do calmly. I think getting a child ready for bed in the evening should be about a fifteen minute process. You read a story, brush your teeth, get a drink of water and go to bed. After that, there should be no reason to get out of bed. If they come up with a reason, it was an unnecessary one and they should be sent back to bed without whatever the request was. Once you start giving in to requests they make when they get out of bed, they will try again and again to find a request that will work for them. I’m not sure how children come up with the excuses they do. It’s not like they’re old enough to watch it on t.v. to learn the secrets. And they don’t have friends sharing ideas with them. But they all come up with the same excuses for getting out of bed. It’s a natural instinct for kids to try and make their parents do things for them when they should be going to bed. The moral of the story is, don’t start giving into their requests.

Okay, so you’re kids are sleeping and a couple hours later you turn in for the night. Have you ever been sound asleep in the middle of a dream and feel a very soft tap, tap, tap on your shoulder. My kids used to do that to me and it scared me to death! I would get up and walk them back to their bedroom and a couple hours later there would be another tap, tap, tap. I didn’t know how to break this habit. I told them to quit doing it, but they still did. Until one night after they woke me up, I told them to go back to bed. They said they wanted me to walk them back to their bedroom. I said I was too tired and didn’t want to get out of bed. I explained that if they found their way to my bedroom, they can find their way back. They stopped coming to my bedroom in the night after that.

Whatever you do when you get that tap, tap, tap, don’t let them crawl into bed with you. It’s very tempting to do because you’re tired and just want to go back to sleep. If you let them crawl into bed with you once you might as well plan on letting them crawl in every night. Laugh if you want to, but I’ve heard the stories from my daycare families whose kids don’t even know where their own bed is located. We, personally, never let our kids crawl into our bed.