Evenings with children as their bedtime gets later?

[OTannenbaumOTannenbaum]

Hi everyone,

My children are only 4.5 and nearly 2, so still young but I've been thinking this evening about how our evenings are going to look when they start staying up later. As my husband and I won't exactly be able to watch things like the Diplomat anymore 😁
When I was a child, I just stayed up and watched the TV with my mum and gran (Emmerdale, coronation street, EastEnders, brookside 😅born in the 80s, child in the 90s). So the evenings revolved around their TV time.

Can I please ask how your evenings were with your children as they started going to bed later? Did they just watch your normal tv? Did you put more "family friendly" stuff on? Did you play games or read together or do something else entirely?

DS is eight. He's allowed downstairs til 7.30pm then he can play in his room til 9pm. We tell him if there are particular grown up things we're watching (Lockerbie this week) but had to give up on Rivals just in case he came back down when someone was mid shag!

Dd is only 5 but struggles with sleep and sometimes takes 2.5 hours to go down! As she has autism, this is quite typical

I do her bedtime routine, bath, book and bedtime song

Then, during the winter, I put her in bed with me on the electric blanket and I put emmerdale and corrie on low in the background

As we head into the summer and it's warmer, and i move bedtime back to about 8.30, I'll keep her downstairs and have cartoons after dinner until 7.00 then eastenders and 'quiet time cuddles' befofe we start moving upstairs

We're a tv house tbh but I try to limit the tablet to just weekends and holidays

Books and colouring in in the afternoons after school until dinner then tv

6&9 yr olds here with 8pm bedtime. A couple of nights we’re busy with clubs, other evenings they come home from school and play together or watch some tv while I make dinner, we eat together and then maybe have a game or family friendly tv show together, then it’s bedtime. Once they’ve gone to bed DH and I have an hour or so of grown up telly - but agree with PP, we tend to avoid anything really adult until late, just in case either wander in with “I-can’t-get-to-sleep” and accidentally catch something bad!!

Family dinner 6:30/7pm one clears up the other takes DC upstairs aim for them to be in bed by 7:30/8 (KS1) 8:30/9pm KS2. This with a wake up time around 7am. Bizzarely when they went to secondary school which actually fed them early ( 5pm) so they could get on with home work by 6ish allowed them upstairs on their screens by 7:30 when DH and I would eat. Electronic black out from 9:30 pm.

@itsallbowlsbaby same, we send both dc up to bed around 8 and they read in room until 9:30 ish otherwise we could never watch adult tv as I'd be asleep at 10:30pm! In the summer we usually walk the dog around 7-8pm so bed is pushed back but we're busy out or in garden etc...