Child-free time with your spouse?

[SlightlyHassled]

My DH is very frustrated at the difficulty of spending time together in the evenings. My children can't settle into bed until late, and DH goes to bed early so we rarely get an evening together. My 8 y.o. has PDA (pathological demand avoidance) and getting to bed is the thing he struggles most with (as do we). It's usually DH's bedtime by the time the 8 y.o. is settled.

I'm sure this is pretty common, and everyone with older children will have children awake in the evenings anyway, so there must be some good ideas for work-arounds.

Do you get evenings to yourselves, and if not, how do you make sure you have time to spend with your spouse?

Get divorced, agree shared custody.

This might be a slightly extreme solution but it worked for me.

Since having children we arrange 'dates' any time we can even when they were babies during nap times for example.

Our children still have an early bedtime. 4/6yos go to bed around 6.15 and our nearly 9yo has a book with us and then reads or plays in her room from around 7.15 this way we get quality time in the evening but it sounds really tricky with PDA coming into play (I'm sorry I don't know anything about that) can you start bedtime earlier or does that not work out? Can you choose a different time of day to spend time together? Is there an hour a day when your kids watch a movie and you two have some quality time together?

We now arrange dates during school time during the day when DH is WFH/I work nights and we get a nice lunch together.

I think for us we are now in the mindset of prioritising the time we spend together over all the other stuff we have to get done and getting creative about making it happen. It is so important (for us) to have this time. I hope you find a way to get something sorted. :)

Good luck 🤞

‘My children’ - are they joint children? If not does their father ever have them?

@whycantwegoonasthree That's probably a bit drastic for me!

@Pissinthepottyplease Yes, they're joint children (no idea why I just said 'my'!)

@coffeecup88 I think that'd work to have them watch something while we do something at another time. We home educate, and my youngest wouldn't go and play at a friend's house unless I were there too, which means we don't really get child-free time unless my in-laws come over. (We should do that more often though.) PDA means my son gets massively stressed over people trying to 'make' him do things, to the point where he simply can't do them. Unfortunately the number one thing he struggles with is cleaning his teeth, so trying to get his teeth cleaned causes masses of procrastination and battles every night, making bedtime really late even if we try to put him to bed really early.

@coffeecup88 That was helpful too about having the right mindset - thanks!

Ah that sounds very challenging! My first thought was could you engineer a way to do teeth after dinner and therefore uncouple it from the bedtime routine?

I think for us a switch came when we consciously decided to prioritise each other. :)

What time does DH go to bed? What time do you go? What time does everyone get up?

Just wondering if there's scope for the other end of the day for you time

I agree with @coffeecup88 about trying to untangle teeth brushing from bedtime. Are there any strategies that work with your son whereby he could brush them straight after dinner and then settle down for his favourite TV show/30 minutes screen time etc. I don't know about PDA but having teeth brushing entwined with bedtime must make the whole evening v stressful

@SleepingStandingUp DH goes to bed at 10. I go at somewhere between 11 and 1. He gets up at something after 6 and leaves for work around 7ish, maybe a bit later. The children and I get up at...well, in theory 7, but in practice more like 7.30. We don't usually see DH in the mornings. DH and I have had 20 years of experience of studiously avoiding each other in the mornings (I'm not a morning person) but spending time together then would be worth exploring. He goes to bed early partly because he has insomnia so never knows how much of the night he'll be awake for.

Those are good points about disentangling tooth brushing from bedtime. At the moment, we eat dinner late, so as soon as we've finished, we start doing bedtime. But an earlier dinner would make that easier. If nothing else, I wouldn't feel so under pressure about getting teeth cleaned quickly.

Ahh, the class clown response. Which is not even relevant.