Published on March 21, 2025 12:30 PM GMT
A few months ago I was trying to figure out how to make bedtime gobetter with Nora (3y). She would go very slowly through the process,primarily by being silly. She'd run away playfully when it was timeto brush her teeth, or close her mouth and hum, or lie on the groundand wiggle. She wanted to play, I wanted to get her to bed on time.
I decided to start offering her "silly time", which was 5-10min ofplaying together after she was fully ready for bed. If she wantedsilly time she needed to move promptly through the routine, andbeing silly together was more fun than what she'd been doing.
This worked well, and we would play a range of games:
Standing on a towel on our bed (which is on the floor) while Ipulled it out from under her.
That, but jumping and I needed to time the pull right.
We roll around with me tickling her.
That, but I keep pretending to fall asleep only to wake up andtickle her more as she nearly escapes.
Pretending she's a burrito, by rolling her up in the towelalong with a bunch of imaginary toppings and then pretending to eat itall.
Lots of one-off things, some of which she'd ask for a few timesand then get bored.
After a couple weeks Lily (10y) and Anna (then 8y) said they wantedsilly time too. I told them if they were completely ready for bed bytheir official bedtime (8:30 for a 7:15 wakeup) they could have sillytime too. This has been very motivating for them: they pay attentionto the time and try very hard to be ready. I wish they wouldn't cutit so tight—it's common for them to come running up to me at8:30 on the dot asking "did I make it!?—but at this point I onlyvery rarely end up skipping silly time because they took too long.
Initially they wanted to do the same games as Nora, but more recentlythey've been really into 2-on-1 wrestling. The rules:
- The teams are Lily and Anna vs JeffA team get a point by holding someone's shoulders to the mat (bed)for a count to three.It's not enough to hold them down while they're on their back;their shoulders do need to be touching the mat.No hitting, kicking, or other things that make an impact.
While we're not evenly matched (they still haven't pinned me), inoperating under the constraint that I need to not hurt them we'reclose enough that it takes a good bit of effort for me to pin them.If I just try to pin one with no strategy the other will rescue beforeI count to three. I really like this dynamic, because it meansthey're working together, and I think it's good for theirrelationship.
courtesy of Ajeya
Another thing I like about this game, weirdly enough, is that peopledo accidentally get mildly hurt sometimes. For example, last night Lilykneed herself in the nose twice. Unlike most parts of their lifewhere they generally take time to focus on their injury and ideallyblame someone, they like this game enough that they recover veryquickly and we keep going. This even happens when one of them hurtsthe other; normally they'd probably try to convince me to interveneand punish but here they're on the same side and need each other'shelp. While if I thought was likely to get actually injured I wouldwant to change what we're doing, over the last few weeks of playingthis I've seen them get substantially more resilient.
Probably the biggest downside is that this isn't very restful,but they seem to be falling asleep fine, and I haven't noticedincreased morning tiredness or anything.
I don't expect to continue doing this indefinitely. Maybe they'll getbored (as they already did once; we had a few weeks of pillow fightsin the middle), someone will get hurt enough that this isn't fun, orNora will want to join in and we'll need to change it a lot (thecurrent version would be too dangerous for her). But it's fun fornow!
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