To ask how you don’t lose your shit??

[BuzzBuzzBuzzLightyearToTheRescue]

My girls are fabulous. They are clever and funny and close and I love being their mum.

However, they go from being angelic to absolute demons at night. Especially the eldest (7). I’m struggling to keep it together. I end up losing the rag which just makes me feel like the worlds worst mum. It can ruin an otherwise perfectly lovely day.

As soon as bedtime rolls around, they start to ignore me. They go from calm to utterly hyper. It’s like herding cats to get their bedtime routine done and the pair of them into bed. The eldest just carries on, wanders about, ignores me if I ask her to get into her bed (even if just to read).

Youngest (6) will generally carry on for ten mins but then goes to sleep. Fine. Eldest however simply refuses to go to sleep. Tonight my husband was out and she was still wandering the floors gone midnight. I constantly returned her to bed. She has lost her Switch privileges for tomorrow. Nothing worrying or upsetting her, by the way. I have asked and asked. She just gets bored in her bed and doesn’t want to go to sleep.

Whilst midnight is an extreme example, this is most nights with the eldest. I feel like my husband and I get no privacy and no time to just relax because she just appears down to see what we are up to and then won’t go back to bed. Eventually one of us loses the rag and then she gets upset and we feel terrible but to be honest it is just too much!! The other night I caught her hiding in the hall, listening to our conversation and what we were watching on tv.

She has a bedtime routine. Same as her sister and has been the same for years. She goes to bed about 7.45-8pm and is allowed to read as long as she likes (if I go in and take her book off her, she just gets up. I figure it’s better that she’s in bed reading at 10pm than wandering about…).

I’ll be honest. I’m running out of patience. She just doesn’t seem to need that much sleep. How, HOW do you keep your temper with this?! I don’t want to bark and moan and shout at her to go to bed. I hate that. But at 11pm it just feels like…please just go away!!

sounds to me like she wants some attention and she doesn’t care what kind as long as she gets it. Personally I would give her an extra 15-20 mins up with you to chat and read etc. do you think she would enjoy the 1 to 1 @BuzzBuzzBuzzLightyearToTheRescue

If it’s so baffling, explain why. I’m assuming that you are trying to insinuate something about step fathers. I don’t think this thread, where there is no suggestion the kids even have a step father, is the place for it. This adds nothing to the thread, and the faux naivety of finding the thoughts of others ‘astounding’ and ‘baffling’ is really tedious.

If the child’s sleeplessness has coincided with the introduction of a new partner… there could be all sorts of reasons… the child feeling left out or feeling she is getting less attention and love from her mother… to the far more worrying and serious, such as abuse. Some men prey on women with young children. In those relationships, the interest is in the child/ren rather than the adult mother.

After a nice bedroom routine, plus stories read by me in bed and a little chat,(any worries etc), they knew I expected them to stay in their rooms. they weren’t allowed to come out of their rooms unless to go to the loo, or if it was an emergency.

If they did come out I would ask what the emergency was, if there wasn’t they were quite sternly told it was bedtime and they must go to bed.
If you Dd ignores all that then you have every right to lose you’re shit with her!

I would caveat all that with saying I would
chat to her during the day when she’s happy and relaxed and ask her why she keeps getting when you’ve told her not to. She may be worried about something.

Good grief

so it might not be that the daughter doesn’t like the SD and doesn’t want her mum spending time with him in the evenings?

that didn’t occur to you?

Do you have children? SC? Genuine genuinely how someone could be a parent or step parent and not grasp the possibility of a step parent in the equation impacting a child’s behaviour

Genuinely curious

Where does the OP say her children have a step dad? This anti step parent derail is very bizarre. I didn’t have a step parent, and neither do my kids, so I have no vested interest in defending them, but that you automatically leap to there even being a step parent is odd, let alone that this step parent that you don’t even know exists is abusing the OP’s DD’s is frankly, insane.

I very much doubt the OP appreciates the weird derail, so I’ll leave you to get on with your strange agenda.

Good grief indeed.

She doesn’t

the PP asked a question

you questioned the relevancy

I didn’t have a step parent, and neither do my kids, so I have no vested interest in defending them,

but it would indicate why you think a potentially very relevant question is “irrelevant”

no one is criticising SPs

but as many of not all SPs will testify - childrens behaviour is often impacted by presence of a SP

What time does she get up in the morning? If she is getting up late then she will be going to bed late.

Bed time is clearly too early.

My kids are 7 and 9. They go upstairs to chill out, play, watch telly or do whatever the hell they want as long as it's not downstairs read at 7.30pm. I don't make them get into bed until 9pm. Eldest could quite happily sit reading all night.

If it’s fomo, I would literally turn the fuses off at the box so there’s no lights, no tv, no radio, and just sit in silence and wait her out.

@BuzzBuzzBuzzLightyearToTheRescue sounds like a nightmare, and it sounds like you have probably tried lots already. The only thing I can think is, maybe model winding down, getting slower and quieter as bed time nears, another thing you could do is ask them what time they think they should go to bed - this may be a crazy idea, but there’s a good chance they won’t choose much later than their current bed time, and you at least have them taking responsibility a bit, they are maybe less likely to rebel against something they’ve chosen?

They need a minimum of 9 hours ideally so as close as you can get to that I’d probably count as a win. Maybe ask her to design her own routine too, and if she doesn’t like that one then you can encourage her to come up with another one?
At 7, it probably is FOMO, I still get that now occasionally, but she’s old enough to know she probably does need sleep so if you can facilitate her taking control of the situation that might help. For example, you might agree not to nag her or remind her,m at all on an experimental basis, for a few days as she finds her groove. That way it will take the pressure off both of you.

My son struggles to settle but his white noise machine has been a game changer.

I am incredibly strict with my children precisely because I have no patience for this kind of shit.
I see what other parents put up with and think I would have been tempted to abandon my kids if they had been like that.
...only a tiny bit joking

I have never cared if they play reasonably quietly in their room, they do not have to stay in bed. They do have to stay in their room though.

…what? She doesn’t have a step dad my husband is very much her dad. And he usually does exactly the same running up and down the stairs with her as I do but he was out last night.

I’m glad you exist in a charmed world where this sort of thing is not relevant and bad things don’t happen, but I can assure you they do, as can many others who work in the field of safeguarding children can testify.

It was simply a question, and no one had or intended to jump the gun before the question had been answered. We want to help this mother and her child, do you have some other contribution to add that is helpful?

Id say bedtime is too late not too early, she sounds chronically overtired which is exacerbating the issue.
I’d be getting very cross and would have “lost my shit” long before now.
It would be no screens or privileges with a lengthening ban directly proportionate to the length of not being in her bed.

Audio book with headphones.

It sounds so tough, I'm not in the same position but I think it it was me I would go to bed at the same time as her for a few nights. If she has got a bit of fomo and sees that Mum and Dad are just going to bed to it could help?

I find if you rarely lose your shit, then it works when you do.

Have you tried giving her foods that are naturally high in melatonin before bed time?
pistachio nuts are a favourite in our house.

Melatonin. Nothing else worked for us. Horrible sleep since birth, and I have tried every suggestion in this thread (except the sleep therapist, because there is no Children’s sleep service here and the fuses, because it wasn’t necessary. I was also in bed, usually with her, and not engaging in any way). Melatonin was a game changer because I could chill out about it all the incredibly strict structure I had in place to try and combat it. Not that it made the blindest but if difference. (It’s not placebo, because sometimes I forget and then it’s back being awake until midnight again). She was so, so tired, but there was no way for to get more sleep. It was hell, for both of us.

I do have a child’s sleep meditation called ‘The lake’, and there was a kids yoga thingy on YouTube called ‘bedtime yoga’. That were the only other things that made any difference. They didn’t help her sleep, but it did stop her flapping around like a fish (while complaining she couldn’t sleep. It was INFURIATING. I mean, of course you can’t sleep. You haven’t been still for two seconds together). And the dread of knowing there’s a battle coming, every single night, and that you never get a couple of hours to just chill was just heartsinkingly horrible. I hated bedtime. Hated it.