A Spoonful of Sugar. Liz Fraser
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Название: A Spoonful of Sugar
Автор: Liz Fraser
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Секс и семейная психология
isbn: 9780007310098
isbn:
I wonder what Granny thinks about routine and the importance of setting out some patterns and rhythms in a house with children? Is it good for them, and should we be trying to stick to routines that work for us? Or do they need more flexibility and irregular patterns in their lives?
‘Routine is vital for a child, oh yes,’ she tells me emphatically. ‘And the most important one is bedtime.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, just think about it: I hear of parents who just cannot get their kids to bed in the evening – but they’re watching the television until two minutes before bed! How can they ever sleep then?!’
Granny’s Pearl of Wisdom
You have to establish a very clear routine of calming children down in the hour before it’s time to go to bed – the same every day. A child will learn that and then settle down very easily.
Mica, who has been out for all of about five minutes, now wants to come in. Maybe that’s part of his routine, and Granny’s is to open and shut the door.
‘So what kind of a routine did your kids have before bed?’
‘Well, the most important thing was to get some peace before bed time. It helps to settle them. So they’d all have a bath together – by the end of the day they were filthy! – and I’d give them all a good soaping. When your dad was born we had no electricity and he’d be bathed in a big zinc tub in front of the fire.’
I feel a brief moment of ‘ohhh, poor little thing!’ before remembering this is my dad we’re talking about, and he was hardly a shrinking violet – the pictures I’ve seen of him as a baby suggest the zinc bath was likely to come off rather worse than he did. Bless his cotton socks (if they had any back then …).
‘And did you have a rigid bedtime?’
‘Oh yes. The children were all in bed by half past seven until they were at least ten or so. Then we started to let it get a little later – they had homework and music practice. But you have to have a routine in place; otherwise they’ll stay up half the night and get exhausted.’
This point about exhaustion is one I discuss ad flipping nauseam with my eldest who seems to think that she is the ‘only person in my whole claaaass!!’ who goes to bed this side of midnight. (She is not. I’ve checked.) Sadly, what happens when she gets less than ten hours’ sleep for two days running is that she gets shadows under her eyes that could well land me in jail for child neglect and cold sores on her mouth that are both unsightly and painful. The fact is that she needs sleep, and thus needs to go to bed early!
THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
The amount we need to sleep changes a lot with age, and also with how much activity (mental and physical) we do. Each person is different, and the amount we need varies from day to day. Know your child, and what he can cope with, and adjust accordingly.
An average toddler needs about eleven hours’ sleep per night, plus a nap in the day of an hour or so, while a child of ten doesn’t have a nap in the day at all, but still needs about ten hours’ sleep. By the time they hit adolescence children can get by with about eight and a half or nine hours’ sleep per night, but many don’t get half that amount because they’re up late, watching telly or out with friends.
School-aged children need to get enough sleep so that they can concentrate on their work, learn and behave well at school. Establish a sensible bedtime which enables this amount of sleep, and stick to it as much as possible.
Sleep is a basic need of the human body and prolonged periods of not getting enough can result in serious difficulties concentrating, working and keeping well. Kids are growing and learning at a phenomenal rate and generally using up a lot of energy all the time – they need sleep to recuperate!
Getting enough sleep can become a real battleground as kids get older because they want to stay up later to feel ‘grown up’. Sadly this does them no good if they are becoming sleep-deprived. Try to explain that sending them to bed is not a punishment – it’s what they need to learn, grow and be healthy. Even if you can bring bedtime forward by fifteen minutes, that’s a good step.
Now, all of this routine is something I believe in very strongly, but, to be quite honest, I think a completely rigid and unmove-able routine is not so very helpful. Children do need to learn that sometimes things change and we can’t always do what we’d like, or what we usually do. It teaches them flexibility; the ability to cope when things change.
For me, there was probably a little bit too much routine, though I’d say at least half of this was self-imposed, and I did develop some rather obsessive-compulsive tendencies from quite a young age that I used as a safety net. So long as the alarm clock rang six times, I got out of bed with my right foot and the bathroom light went on before I stepped into the room, all was well. That kind of thing. It can be hard to adapt to ‘unknowns’ if you are brought up with immoveable routines, so I’d advocate having a clear system throughout the week, but letting this shift ever so slightly as new things present themselves.
We still stick to a ‘no screen-time after dinner, bath, stories, lights out’ routine every night and have done for over ten years so far – but if there’s the odd one where we’re travelling or we’ve got friends round then it all goes out of the window for a day. Life is too short to be totally anal about these things – one night a month isn’t going to harm your kids!
So bedtime routine is important. What about other routines in the family home – is it helpful to have systems in place, patterns of activities and some kind of a rhythm in a home?
Granny thinks it is: ‘Listen, you don’t want to run a home like an army, with Mummy blowing her whistle when it’s time for dinner, or time to do homework. But if you can have some kind of routine each day it just makes life so much easier!’
‘For whom – the children or you?’
‘Well, for both actually. If kids have homework every day, or even every week when they’re little, have a “homework time”. That could be Saturday afternoon, or each day at 4 p.m. Whatever fits your family. That way it won’t get forgotten, and eventually it becomes a habit: Four o’clock is homework time. Then there’s no pushing and forcing them to do something – they know that’s what they do at that time. It’s clearer for them, and much easier for you.’
Granny’s Pearl of Wisdom
Routine is vital in a child’s life. It needn’t be unnecessarily strict, but a basic pattern of what happens when provides a very important and useful structure to their lives, and helps to get them mentally prepared for each part of the day, for example, playtime, homework, bed.
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