Go To Sleep

Have you heard the buzz about a new book called “Go The F*** To Sleep?”  Adults, it seems, are divided.  Is the book hilarious satire meant to comfort parents who are at their wits end trying to get their little ones to sleep?  Or is it another sign of our society’s profane attitude toward even children?

As anyone who’s spent any significant time with me can attest, I’m not offended by coarse language.  And the book made me laugh when the controversy around it grew so loud that I could resist looking at it no longer.

Still, I did find the book troubling.  You could not have written this book forty years ago. There was no major problem with kids not going to sleep then.  You put them to in their beds and they didn’t get up.

Why?  What’s changed?

I’ve read several responses to the book from people who say that, while they get frustrated with their kids’ bedtime antics, they see those antics as attempts to spend more time with their parents.  Surely this has to be different from how my parents would have understood similar behavior.  And in this respect, I’m in my parents’ camp.

Of course kids want to spend more time with their parents.  And it’s often right to give them that time.  I’m homeschooling, folks, so you don’t have to convince me that it’s a good thing to spend more time with your kids.  But 8:30 at night is rarely that time.

At that time, at any time after you’ve put them down, you are being manipulated.

Does that sound harsh and judgmental?  Maybe it is, but I believe it, at least for 99% of kids 99% of the time.

Kids need to sleep.  I’ve read over and over that today’s kids are getting significantly less sleep than in decades past, and significantly less than they need.  And sleep loss leads to cognitive and behavioral problems.  Kids need to sleep.

Perhaps I’m being a little harsh here because sleep is the one area where Jeff and I have been unequivocally successful.  Unless of course you think we ruined our kids at three months when we Ferberized them.

If you are not familiar with sleep philosophies, Ferberizing means that we payed attention to when they needed to sleep, set up a sleep schedule, put them in their beds, kissed them on the forward, prayed the Aaronic blessing over them (those last two were add-ons, but I think it still counts), and then walked out the door.

The first days, I stood in front of their door to bar Jeff from going in to rescue them.  I brought him tissues to wipe his eyes.  And then we listened to them cry.  And cry.  It was harsh for a couple of days and then it was over.

I say all of this not to tout my superior parenting skills.  (Okay, well that’s not the only reason I say this.)  I say this because I think there is something truly messed up in our culture.

And swearing too much is not it.  We live in a culture that lets children chose the family van based on which entertainment systems they like best, where children rule the roost and parents are losing their minds, where in the book in question, the child ultimately “wins” and walks out of her room while her father sleeps.

Taking a look at my own rage over the years that I’ve been parenting, it’s almost always been related to an area where I haven’t done the hard work of teaching my kids to discipline themselves.  So while I don’t relate to the particular struggle of putting kids to bed, I understand more than I want to of the book.

But instead of making a profane joke tonight, I’m going to pray to do better tomorrow.  First, though, I’m gonna go to sleep.