Should I do every bedtime or let DH continue to fail miserably?

[Porterpolitics]

DH and I have two children, 5 and 3, with one more arriving very shortly. He hasn’t ever been especially good at bedtime and what will usually take me 30 mins in soft lighting, hushed voices and whispered stories takes him 90+ mins on a good night, with high tempo dance music blaring, shouting, screaming, often culminating in him losing his sh1t and me having to intervene. This means the 60/40 split is increasingly 80/20 with me seeing them both off most days of the week, in spite of being quite heavily preggo.

He appears to be a) unable to fathom why allowing them to bounce round the room won’t make them magically fall asleep and b) unable to understand that the amount of time we have together to unwind in the evenings is the inverse of how much time he spends putting them to bed. He also won’t listen when I tell him he needs to whisper, calm his voice or encourage some quiet time. He simply tells me they don’t behave for him like they do for me whilst simultaneously blaring out Taylor Swift from his phone.

He recently took a few days off work and ran them into the ground so that by the time I got home from work at 5pm, they were both asleep on the sofa, filthy, not fed and fully dressed. I woke them up to eat and brush teeth but they then obviously were not tired for bed.

So far it hasn’t been ideal (!) but the oldest is now primary school age and I’m about to EBF DC3 so I’ll be taken out of the equation and will no longer be able to intervene as readily as I do now. I don’t want our oldest to be going to bed so late that they fall asleep at school.

So my question is WWYD? Would you take over every single bedtime knowing they’ll be down before 8pm, even though that will likely mean doing so with a newborn hanging off my boob? Or would you leave him to it and hope he eventually works it out on his own? I’ve been attempting the latter for weeks but it is getting us nowhere except later and later bedtimes.

I’m no good at expressing milk and don’t want to bottle feed DC3 so I know they will be Velcro’d to me whatever happens.

Leave him to it. He'll get bored of spending 90 minutes every evening putting the kids to bed.

Just stop taking over.

Je does his bedtime his way as he’s an equal parent. If he loses his shot he has figure it out for himself.

You are coming from the assumption your way is right and that won’t help him gain confidence to find a way that actually works for him.

If he comes to you asking what he can do ask him what he thinks the roles and respond with “I’m wondering why you think that’s happening” and words like that. It’s a really successful technique.

It's not "let him fail" it's "let him learn" leave him to it. He's not doing anything abusive or neglectful so leave him to learn his was of putting the kids to sleep. DH and I have very different ways of putting the kids down. You're different people. You will have different ways. That's ok. Just leave him to it and relax while he learns .

OP, I’ve got 3 DC aged 8, 3, and 2, so I know how challenging bedtime can be.

Does your DH find it easier with one particular child? Could you, for example, have your DH responsible for the oldest 5-year old’s bedtime while you handle the other two? This is often how we would do it when DC#3 was a newborn. DH would go for an evening walk with the oldest, while I did the bath/book/bottle/bed with middle DC while wearing baby in the sling. (Highly recommend the sling by the way! I never used it with my first two, but it was absolute godsend when trying to physically wrangle the middle DC).

DH and oldest would return home and I’d leave them to it for bedtime while I bottle fed newborn and put him down to sleep. I didn’t EBF any of my DC so I don’t have experience with what that’s like while juggling other children.

Even now they are slightly older we still tag team on bedtime. I still usually do younger two and DH does oldest. I prefer it that way because I can get my workout in while DH is doing bedtime with oldest.

Also just want to say - ignore the posters giving you grief for having a third DC. I am so so so unbelievably happy with my family of 5, and would still feel the same if my DH couldn’t manage bedtime very well.

Ours do this too! I also found that an evening walk right before starting the bedtime routine really helps too. They jump around and are crazy and it seems to get all the silliness out before bedtime. Obviously much easier when the weather is nice and it’s still light out.

Don’t take over, or you’ll end up doing it all, always. Stay out the way if it’s supposed to be just him.
Ask him how it went. Suggest quiet music and quiet tones and a story. But don’t critique him, make constructive suggestions. “Have you tried..?”

We used to help each other, tbf or one would cook while the other did bathtime. (If I understood EBF correctly and it means extended bf beyond six months, if I was a man I wouldn’t agree to doing bath time to enable this, there just isn’t enough time when you’re both working and there are other children. It puts too much pressure on everyone else.)

Divide and conquer. With DT’s we did bedtime one on one. Your 30 minutes with soft lighting and hushed voices sounds a little excessive. A five minute story, cuddle and kiss goodnight. 10 minutes max. Rotate which child you do each night. They soon learn the routine and it will be quick and easy for both you and your DH.

I'd have him do the cleaning whilst I do bed time. Babies are never too young to start a bed time routine, carrying baby whilst your doing the soft lighting and story time will be good for baby to learn the difference between night and day early on.

Let him learn the hard way. He needs to learn how to be a father.

It does sound like weaponised incompetence that requires an audience.

I think you should physically leave the house at bedtime, go for a stroll, meet a friend whatever. Tell him to text you when they are down so you can spend some quality time together… I suspect he will change his ways pretty quickly.

I'm going against the grain here. There is evidence to suggest that a bit of high-energy play before bed is actually great for children and helps them to sleep. Children are also perfectly capable of understanding that there are different rules for different people and contexts.

I would suggest that your DH can do bedtime his way but he should start earlier. If you take the kids up at 7pm to be asleep by 7:30 then he could go up at 6pm or so and they can have their extra hour of time together and still be asleep when you want them to be asleep. This might do him getting wound up as there's not the same time pressure.

There's no right way to do these things. Children don't respond to people the same way. Your DH could do sky the same things as you and the children might just not behave for him like they do for you. Let him be a parent.

You need to leave him to it. He’s also fully their parent, a competent adult. The chipotle jolidays must be a good time for him to figure it out. Although it’s a wonder that they’re 5 and 3 and he hasn’t figured out how to put them to bed efficiently

Have you tried suggesting to him 'hey, why dont you try it my way for a week and see how you get on, we'll tell the kids first that we're going to start being calm from 7pm so any dancing is before then, if you dont think its an improvement then you can go back to your way, but maybe just try it?'
Crucial that you tell the kids there will be a change so he can stick to 'remember we decided we are going to stay calm after 8' rather than just go 'but they begged me for dancing!!'

If he isn't feeding and washing the kids, it isn't incompetence, it's neglect!

Honestly, my kids are 5 and 3 and I do every bedtime (unless I am out/away which is rare) because our kids just will not settle for my husband, I think he overstimulates them, he disagrees, but it was regularly taking him 3 hours to get them to bed, which frequently resulted in lost tempers and the kids getting aggressive with each other/him. I reliably have them both bathed, teeth brushed, stories read and in bed within 45 mins, time that he now uses to tidy up and get prepped for the next day. It works for us and we've been doing it for about 6 months now. It might change again in the future but for now I do every night and it is one of my favourite parts of the day, everyone gets a good night's sleep and we get a couple of hours to ourselves in the evening. He's an excellent dad and the kids adore him during the day but bedtime with him was so painful, and I was ending up getting involved most nights anyway, just several hours later and once everyone was in a foul mood. Me doing it makes everyone's evening much more pleasant and surprisingly on the odd nights I am unavailable they are much calmer with dad now.

He sounds like an incompetent pillock and it's completely unfair on the kids, his ridiculous behaviour. He loses his shit with them, purely because he has amped them up and got them silly and frazzled at bedtime? Completely out of order and I'd be defending those kids, firstly. He needs to control his own behaviour.

Why is he taking his phone upstairs for bedtime anyway? New rule, he leaves it downstairs.

I'd be having serious words, he is expected to parent properly and appropriately and ensure his offspring get the sleep they need! And you don't need the stress while you're pregnant. He needs to shape up!

Shouldn't he be doing his fair share before you have the newborn, so he can then step up more when the baby arrives

I’d suggest that he “plays with them”, either indoors or out, for an hour before bath time. Then calm down in the bath, and a story in bed.
And then go out, leaving him to it.

Buy him a parenting book or pass him a dossier of parenting research so he can't suggest the way you are doing it is wrong. Is he thick or gaslighting?

different perspective but considering you have a baby arriving, I would try to make the bedtime for the bigger ones less of an ordeal. Yes his way is excessive, but so is half an hour of hushed tones - you won't be able to do that with a newborn. At that age, I would tell mine to brush teeth, put PJs on and wait for parents to come say goodnight, they don't need hands on 'bedtime doing'.

Oh I’d have lost patience with him a long time ago.

If he wants to be a prat lede him to it. It’s his evening.

leaving them to sleep dirty and unfed on the sofa was particularly pathetic.

Stop intervening. His way may be the opposite of ideal, but I suspect he is correct that the kids don’t behave for him like they do for you, because the kids know if they behave awfully for dad eventually mum will appear. Just let him persevere in whatever way he can, eventually he will find a way that works, and yes it might be different from your way but you have to accept that.

I’m all for an easy life. You do the bedtimes, give DH some jobs you hate to do in that time. Then you have loads of time together. It’s okay that he’s shit at something you excel at x

Make him start half an hour earlier 🤷‍♀️

Does he have ADHD? It sounds a bit like my attempts at bedtime unless I successfully follow DH's more regimented timed approach. The problem is that I get carried away in whatever is the current bit that the kids are having a whale of a time with and/or I let them go on too long because they are having a lovely time playing together in a lovely mood and I forget that I really need to capitalise on the "lovely mood" to cajole them through the boring bits like teeth and getting changed etc otherwise I'm trying to drag them through that bit when they're too tired to play ball nicely, and then I get frustrated and snappy and they get silly and it all explodes in my face. I'm not stupid, I just have difficulty holding the long/medium term goal in mind when I am making shorter term decisions and weighing up all the possible consequences and how they will feed into the medium term. I tend to function better when either there is no medium term goal so it's perfectly fine to go with the flow, or for situations where timing really DOES matter, when I have a really clear set thing to follow and I'm keeping a very keen eye on the timing and it's a bit flexible but I aim for the earlier time in order to give me leeway.

The fact it's getting progressively later when you leave him to it and a few other things is what makes me wonder. I don't know if it sounds weaponised. That usually comes with comments about how it's much easier for you or it works better for you as well as what a hard time he's having etc. (ie, hint hint you need to do it) not just comments in response to you suggesting your own way, which just read as a defensive response to me (and v familiar as well!)

I like the suggestion about getting him to start earlier because his way is obviously fun for the kids until it gets to a point where it's too much, which would probably be avoided by starting earlier.

IME if you want to make suggestions about the actual routine itself but you don't want him to read it as criticism and automatically spring up a defensive wall about it, try saying things like "I find it helpful to XYZ" rather than "You need to XYZ" - for whatever reason, the "you need to" wording seems to come across much more critical and personal, whereas explaining what works for you tends to mean that it comes across as more of a suggestion which he could try out if he wants to.

In general it is easier to discuss though if he's aware of the fact he can be a bit short-sighted and wants to gain some tips, rather than if he's already feeling a bit deflated because it went wrong again and then he feels like anything you say is just needling at him about it because it's so easy/works differently for you. Most likely, he feels that your way doesn't work for him because he tries a bit of it and it doesn't instantly work and so he decides that the entire method is impossible, rather than wanting to troubleshoot and work out why it isn't going the same for him (which is usually a case of it needing more repetition, more consistency, or more calm/patience from the adult). If he can get to a place of genuinely wanting to troubleshoot then you might be able to get somewhere with pointing out what you notice as different from the outside, without expressly telling him what to do differently, although if you like you could say something in the same "I find it helpful" format, like if he says he plays music but it doesn't calm them down, "I have noticed you tend to drift into music with a faster beat, whereas I might start with that music, but by 7:30 I know I need to steer it into calmer songs/activities, so I am always keeping an eye on the time when I start a new song". Or he says that you ask DC to brush their teeth and they just do it whereas they play up for him, you could say something like "I've noticed that they tend to run off because they know you will chase them and they think it's a game. It will take some repetition but I don't chase them around, they just know there will be less story time the longer they take to do their teeth."