When It Comes To Bedtime My Daughter Is A Night Owl

I believe I’m genetically responsible for my daughter being a Night Owl. Which can be troublesome when we are trying to get a four year old to go to sleep at a respectable time. As parents it’s a trait we are trying to nip in the bud because running a sleep time police state can take its toll as the week progresses. The effect is often evident when the weekend rolls around we are parental walking zombies. Each night my wife and I exchange a hopeful glance without any words being uttered. What the glance says is “maybe tonight’s the night Elle goes to sleep at a reasonable time.”

As my daughter gets older I realize there are many characteristics that we have in common. Admittedly some good and a few not so good. It seems one of those shining through to the surface is her nocturnal nature. From what I can remember, when I was I child I had no problem with the actual concept of going to bed. For whatever reason, once the lights went out an internal switch flicked in my mind and all of the sudden I wasn’t tired. Most of the time I would turn on a desk lamp and read until the tiredness would creep back in. Elle seems to have a much more creative take on her nocturnal actives.

Once Elle is in bed, after her mom reads to her and they go through their nightly rituals a refreshing calmness falls over the house. My wife in I settle into bed taking a peruse through the DVR to find a program that will put us to sleep. About five minutes into the program my wife will usually be fast a sleep with her head rested on my chest. Just as I am about to nod off a shadowy figure appears in the door way. I raise my head up and that’s Elle’s queue to jog over to my bedside. Most of the time whatever stirs her out of bed is a a simple fix. I walk her back to her room, tuck her back in and tell her to get sleep. She’ll reply “no problem, I’ll get right to sleep.” I wish that was the case. Usually the rest of the night becomes a game of “find the differences”.

Now I’m awake and it will be a few hours before the tiredness sinks back in and I basically pass out. In this state of full alertness I start my night shift of patrol duty. As not to wake my sleeping wife, the closed captioning is flipped on and I get caught up on news or sports. Doing this also comes in handy because I can tune into any stirring that occurs in the house. Mostly because I know very shortly I will hear something I shouldn’t from Elle’s room. Without fail, ten minutes later I hear the first of the sounds which mean my child is definitely not asleep. I open her bedroom door and see that Elle has discovered the bin of clothes that no longer fit her. Within those ten minutes she has dressed her dog and all of her stuffed animals in full outfits. I quickly escort her back to bed, calmly telling her she needs to get to sleep. She nonchalantly replies with her canned answer of “okay I’ll get right to sleep.” Sometime will pass and a routine check is made. This time everyone is in totally different outfits, including Elle. In order to eliminate the distraction, I send the dog downstairs and remove the bin of old clothes. Again, sometime will pass and a similar situation has unfolded. This time it might be a large stack of books that has made its way on to her bed and she’s intent on reading them all. The cycle repeats. As almost a month of this pattern continued my wife and I were getting to our wits end.

With many of the items removed from Elle’s room still the night owl was at play. We had to think of what might motivate our daughter to sleep at a decent hour. It came down to temporarily taking away her nightly story time. This didn’t sit well with Elle or my wife for that matter. That is a special part of their nighttime routine which they both enjoy. But as I write this post we have had three nights in a row of Elle falling asleep about thirty minutes after she gets into bed. So, maybe bedtime story time was the tipping point. We did promise if she could go seven nights in a row that story time would return. We will see if the night owl returns. And maybe there is promise in being a night owl. In doing some research into the subject I read one study stating night owls are more intelligent than morning larks. Even with that I think everyone in the household would love to have their sleep especially this night owl.

Image: Ed At Home Dad(Edgar Correa)