We’re trying to get DD(12) in bed at a decent time at the moment as she’s a complete pain in the backside at going to bed at a reasonable time. She always has been since she was born.
She reads in bed for ages every night but when we tell her to turn her light off at 9pm, she has a myriad of excuses why she can’t; needs to finish the chapter, has to feed the gerbils, needs to go to the toilet. We give her a 15 minute warning to do these things, then a 5 minute warning, but then there’s a lot a messing around which can go on until after 10pm. This is annoying for us as we can’t settle, watch Homeland telly and if we don’t keep on top of it and keep telling her to go to bed, she’d still be awake until after we went to bed. This is an issue because we have to peel her out of bed in the morning and she does suffer from the lack of sleep.
So… inspired by Divas and Doorslammers, we are removing a minute from the following night’s reading time for each minute she messes around after she’s been told to turn her light off. But I’ve got myself a bit confused with the logistics of this.
For example, with this sanction in mind, on Tuesday night she messed around and finally settled at 9.21pm. So she was told she would have to turn her light off at 8.39pm on Wednesday night.
Last night she put up a lot of resistance to this and whilst she wasn’t able to read from 8.39pm last night, we had to remove the light from her room as she kept turning it back on and she still messed around and finally settled at 9.12pm.
She says she should only lose 12 minutes of reading time tonight as her lights off time is usually 9pm. But we say she should lose 33 minutes as she was supposed to settle at 8.39pm and didn’t.
Which one do you think?
DD is a master of loophole finding and maximising situations to her advantage, so whilst on the one hand we’re fairly happy to go with her method as she has agreed to it, we have a sneaking suspicion that she has found a loophole that means she’s not as penalised as we think she is. But then we can’t work out if that matters as last night she did settle at 9.12pm compared to 9.21pm the previous night.
Help! Who is right, us or DD?
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Behaviour/development
Bedtime shenanigans - who is right, us or DD?
chicaguapa · 07/11/2013 11:52
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