It's ten p.m., and I know exactly where my child is. Upstairs, in her bedroom. But she's not asleep. Last I checked in on her, she met me at the safety gate at the top of the stairs draped in her miniature surgeon's scrubs, her bug-hunting hat perched on her still-damp-from-the-bath hair. The contents of one of her two dress-up trunks are strewn across her bedroom floor.
While the bedrooms of the neighbor's children just across the way are dark, save for a night light in the toddler's room, my three-year-old is wide awake. She isn't up past her bedtime. She doesn't have one.
She has those important rituals of bedtime, sure. She is bathed by me or my husband almost every night, her delicate skin covered first in lotion and then a set of fleecy pajamas. We'll generally settle in her bed to read stories, but sometimes in ours. She gets at least two books read every night — one per parent. On that, there is no negotiating.
What's fluid is the time.
Our daughter goes to bed when we do. And so in the hours after my husband comes home from the office and I finish up my work-at-home writing, we spend our time together. We eat dinner together — even if it's on the living room couch, with a dog staring hopefully at a butterfly-shaped plate set precariously on the edge of the coffee table.
That's why there's no bedtime in our household, why the seven o'clock hour does not turn our child into a screaming, writhing pumpkin who just wants another ten minutes to play with her toys or sit between Mommy and Daddy on the couch. We tried it a few times — the march upstairs to the bedroom, the tuck in, the request for water, the tuck in, the pleas to go potty again, the tuck in. Each night it would go on for an hour or two, her too keyed up for bed, us more exhausted by the minute.
Pretty quickly, we realized it wasn't just a rule we didn't like enforcing but one we saw no point in enforcing. If she was awake, why argue her into bed? Why spend our few hours together as a family every night manning our battle stations?
Commenting recently in the New York Times on the fact that President Barack and Michelle Obama enforce a strict eight p.m. bedtime for daughters Sasha and Malia, Dr. Judith Owens, who directs the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at Hasbro Children's Hospital, says parents unfortunately misjudge the appropriate bedtime because they think their kids need less sleep than they do. Owens says just 2.5 percent of the population needs significantly less sleep than average, but 95 percent of the population wrongly thinks it's in that 2.5 percent category.
But Dr. Perri Klass, who wrote the New York Times piece, points out that the sleep experts suggest "testing your routine by checking whether the child wakes spontaneously, alert and cheerful and ready for the day."
Mine does.
In fact, she still rises earlier in the morning than I do — because she generally still falls asleep before either her father or me, him because he stays up to check out the ESPN scores, me because after a bedtime story, I pick up the latest novel off of my bedside table and spend at least an hour decompressing with some escapist trash.