Is nearly 15 too old for 'bedtime'?

[welshgirlwannabe]

I take my son's screens off him around 10 -10.30 during the week. He then has to go to 'bed' but can read or write or draw. He is now telling me I'm unreasonable and everyone else is allowed to stay up as long as they like. I have his ipad in my room overnight and it does ping with messages until quite late, but I don't think I'm unreasonable.

He says I treat him like a little kid. Just interested in other opinions/ what you do with your nearly 15 year old screens?

Dd is 14 she has a rough bedtime of 9.30,she does have her phone to do her meditation.She is sensible.
However ds 13 is obsessed with his phone,which I take.He goes to bed at 9.

Dd is 15 & has a bedtime. It helps that she is a day student in a boarding school & they have lights out at 10pm

Seems a little early, although not much. I used to work in a boarding school and Y10 lights out was 10:15 with Y11 at 10:30.

I doubt very much that the boarders at your daughter's school will be asleep at that time though. They'll be chatting - or on their phones under the duvet.

By the time a kid is 15 the goal is that they're learning to set their own boundaries and exercise judgement themselves. Does that make sense? So rules should really be starting to fall by the wayside, and trusting them to make good decisions themselves should be what's starting to happen by then.

I'd say 10ish is late enough, but the one thing I would enforce is no devices in bedrooms.

If they choose to read, I wouldn't push it, although if the light was still on after 11 I'd probably stick my head round the door and suggest they got some sleep.

Obviously if they were playing music or keeping anyone else up that'd have to have a curfew, out of respect to everyone else, and if they share a room with younger kids that'd have to be taken into account too.

The only time I'd be really strict with bedtimes with this sort of age would be around exam times, when they need their sleep. Holidays and weekends wouldn't really matter too much at all.

They have to hand in phones at 8.45pm

Bedtimes are:

Yr 7 - 9pm
Yr 8 - 9.15pm
Yr 9 - 9.30pm
Yrs 10-11 - 10pm

My 15 yr old daughter is lights out at 10.30 school nights and 11.30 weekends. We used to give them free rein at weekends and holidays but it played hell with her. She would still be wide awake til 3/4 in the morning, her physical and mental health suffered. So we enforce a curfew. She is like a different girl after a decent nights sleep. I'm pretty sure she will thank me for it when she's older!

I have dcs 16 and 14. During school, I like the dcs in bed by 10pm, and phones etc are bought downstairs. Any later, they struggle,to get up. During holidays, we are much more relaxed about bedtimes.

They have to hand in phones at 8.45pm (at boarding school).

Of course. They'll have a shoe rack or something similar, and at the appointed hour they will each dutifully hand in their phone-which-is-to-be-handed-in. Then after lights out they will be on their phones under the duvet.

But don't tell the teachers. Although, they probably have a pretty shrewd idea anyway. I was a teacher for long enough to learn that the primary purpose of many school rules is to give teenagers something they can self-righteously and indignantly rebel against without resorting to doing anything actually bad.

We did get a letter about the problems of multiple devices!

Norton family automatically disables dds phone at 9pm

And there is no wifi in the boarding house though of course most pay for 4g on their contract.

Going off-topic a bit, but no wi-fi in the boarding house? Where do they do their prep?

There are some computers available in one of the communal rooms but a lot of the work set doesn't require Internet access.

"We recently had suspicions that she was sneaking onto her laptop after that, but learned via a tip on MN that you can disable the wifi for specific devices "

• can anyone tell me how you do that?

probably, that was my dd2. I asked my dh, who is a programmer so does the technicals in our house. It's based on BT, and this is my (possibly garbled) translation:

"Every router has an IP address. You can find it in the router's manual, but it's often a default address, usually 192.168.1.254. You type that number into the address bar of your browser on your local wifi network. That brings up the web interface of your router. The Home Page shows a list of devices that are currently active on your wifi network. (So if a device is switched off at the moment it won't show).

"You'll see links to other pages of Settings, etc. If asked for a password, it doesn't want your usual Wifi password: it's the router's own password that (on BT) is printed on a little flip-out card thing that comes out of the hub. It'll say something like 'Admin Password'.

"You can change settings for specific devices on this list, but knowing which device is which can be tricky.. Each device is shown with its IP address and some sort of network name that may or may not make it obvious which device it is. If it's a PC, it's often a name you gave it when you set it up. If it's one of several phones in the house it can be harder as they'll just be identified as, e.g., 'Android', and a number. You might just have to use trial and error, switching off for one device at a time to see which one loses its wifi.

"The place where you set specific devices to have wifi or not between certain times is in the Settings page, under (for BT) 'BT Access Control'.

(There's also a place called 'Advanced Settings' on BT that shows all devices that have previously connected to your wifi, whether they're currently switched on or not. Dh thinks that you can change wifi times on there as well.)

Ahem. Clear as mud, eh?

I didn't have a specific bedtime at that age, but I went at a reasonable time and we didn't have phones, internet etc in my day. I'm pretty sure we'll still have some sort of rules on screen time before bed when mine are that age.