Camilla McGill explains why kids stall bedtime and how a visual routine listing exact numbers of drinks, stories, and cuddles stops the requests. Clear boundaries and consistency work better than threats, and parents can enforce limits while staying calm.
Questions about battles at bedtime. I'm Camilla McGill at My Parenting Solutions. Here's the first one: What do I do about stalling and excuses? How do I deal with it if they constantly want more water, more cuddles, a drink? Suddenly they say they're hungry. How do we deal with that? If you don't know, be reassured that this is a really common one and one that parents find very difficult to deal with because we sort of feel like, okay, well, I'll get the drink, and then we get the drink, and then we they come back and then there's something else, and then it starts to build up, and, and that's often at the very point when we lose our patience. So children respond really, really well to clarity and routine and knowing what's expected of them, knowing what the boundaries are. So we need to be very clear about what our bedtime boundaries are. I am releasing a brand new course called Bedtime Mastery with the Sleep Method. In a systematic way, I walk you through how to have bedtime mastery. Here's one of the things from the course that I talk about extensively is creating some kind of visual bedtime routine which we make very clear to our children and we stick to. So in that routine, the question was, what do we do about the stalling and excuses? What do we do about 'I need to go and find a toy' 'Or I need you to get me a drink,' or 'I need an extra cuddle,' those kind of things. Now, the emphasis I will always have when I'm helping parents with bedtime is, is that we do this with compassion. We do it in a way that isn't overly strict, it isn't authoritarian. We have authority, but it's not an authoritarian approach where we use threats or punishment. But we do also need to hold the boundary. We do need to make clear to our children what they can and they can't have at bedtime. So within this list that we've created, and ideally we've made it visual for our children, we tell them how many drinks they can have. Now, I would recommend one. How many stories that you're going to give them. How many cuddles you give them. How we say goodnight. What we do when we leave the room, if we're leaving the room. And Therefore, our children know in advance what's expected of them, and we refer to the list. This makes it really easy, so much easier when we have stalling tactics.
