Doing it Wrong: Back to school basics for the rest of us

I know I am doing it wrong... but as I sit in the morning stillness with my coffee on the stand beside me and the sound of the clicking of the computer keys I can't help myself.  JR, Gracie, and Anna are all snoozing peacefully in their beds.  Anthony left for a good 20 minutes ago.  Long enough for me to brew some coffee, eat a quiet breakfast, and check in with the morning news.

I know that I should be getting the kids up early today, but the thought is abhorrent to me.  Tomorrow at this time, they will all be scrubbed fresh, smelling of toothpaste or maple syrup, dressed in their blue shorts and blue shirts, hair still damp from their attempts to make it lay just right.  We will pile in the car and kick of their next school year.

But today I just want quiet.  I want them to sleep. I want them to relax. And yes, I want to relax too.  Just one more day before the craziness of two school drop off and pick up, gymnastics, piano, soccer, soccer and more soccer.

If I were asked the question "how should parents prepare their kids to go back to school?" the answer you get would be very different from what I am actually doing.

Bedtimes
The best way to prepare kids to go back to school is by helping them reset their personal sleep clocks. Kids need to have regularity in their lives and setting their sleep schedules is the best way to regulate other stuff naturally.  Regular bedtimes are touted as the key to getting kids up and off to school bright-eyed and ready to learn.  If you are like many homes and have loosed the bed-time for your kiddos in the summer months, moving back towards their normal bedtime in small increments can be helpful.  Putting your kids to bed 20-30 minutes earlier every few days can gently ease them back into a place where they are prepared to go to be at 8 or 9 and wake up ready for their school day.

Giving up Naps - a reflection

I cling to nap time.  It is my buoy in the ocean of life.  Naps give peace. Quiet.  The time to think and reflect.  The opportunity to write or nap or make phone calls or pick up the toys.  Or just finally sit down.

But naptime is a stage - it doesn't last forever.  And here we are, at that point, and nap time has got to go.

My firstborn didn't need as much sleep as I thought he should.  I tried to make him conform to all the books, worried sick that his brain wouldn't develop optimally without the set amount of sleep.  My husband finally pointed it out that he just doesn't need as much sleep as I want him to get.

I finished my dissertation with him playing quietly in his crib.  He was 18 months when he stopped napping on a regular basis.  He never complained, so I would leave him in his crib to get 'quiet time' while I wrote.  Every now and again he would actually fall asleep, but I think now that was due to sheer boredom.  Even now he needs less sleep than do I.

My second and third-borns are champion sleepers.  Gracie still naps about once a week and she turns 8 this summer.  She was one of those kids who really did sleep through the night before she hit her 2 month birthday.  JR wasn't quite that good, but still these two don't complain about going to bed at night and often are the last ones up.  They seem to like sleep, beds, pillows, all of that lovely stuff.

And then we have my adventuresome spirit. I wrote about protecting her naps and flexibility a while back (read more here).  Anna now takes her nap and sleeps well, but then she is a awake until 10 at night.  We tuck the girls in at 730 and (much like Anthony) then she lays in bed.  Or gets up and lays out her clothes (and her sister's clothes) for the next day.  Or she looks at books.  Or she asks for more water only to then need to go to the bathroom again.  And again.  Then she tries on shoes.  Then she is hungry.  Sometimes she is quiet and we think she fell asleep, only to find her laying in bed with her feet up on the wall just thinking.  The kids don't have toys in their rooms so her entertainment options are pretty limited, but sometimes she even gets dressed for the next day.  Good grief.

The Terrible Night Terrors

Just getting through a normal night of sleep is a challenge when you have kids doing the normal kid things.  I first wrote 10 tips for good-normal sleep (click here), but every now and again you get a child who is stuck in a rut.  In our sleep-depriaved state it can be hard to take a moment to step back and strategize a solution.

One of the most common sleep problems is Nightmares.  About a quarter to a third of children between ages 5 and 12 are affected by nightmares (reference). A less common but more dramatic problem are Night Terrors.

There is no general consensus in the field about why we have dreams, but the brain continues to process while we are sleeping.   Neither frequent nightmares nor night terrors are a sign of some psychopathological problem with a child.  But that doesn't mean they aren't extremely unpleasant and something parents want to help do away with.

The first thing is to differential between Night Terrors and Nightmares. They are two different events, occur at different points in the sleep cycle, and should be handled differently.

Unlocking the preteen and adolescent brain

Ever wonder if your pre-teen or teenager is brain damaged? You aren't alone and for good reason.  They kind-of are.  Well not exactly damaged - they just are under-developed.  

Babies are born with the ability to hear, to see, to move.  As they get older they develop to ability to communicate non-verbally and then verbally.  As children age, naturally they develop the skills to do much of what we adults are able to do.  As they begin puberty, they grow to be about our size and may even have relatively similar physical strength as we do.  But even if they start looking like adults, we have to remember that they are not. Their bodies begin to look more grown-up, but that brain of theirs needs a bit more time to mature.

The human brain is not fully developed until about the mid-20's.  Yes, you heard me right.  Target age 25 as a good year.  The pre-teen years specifically are a time for synaptic growth.  People have the most synapses they will have over their entire life at ages 11 (girls) and 13 (boys).  As kids enter teen years, myelination and neural pruning takes over and synapse production slows again.  What that means, is that the pre-adolescence and teen-age brain is growing and changing like crazy.

Before you think - hey more synapses should make him smarter - you have to realize that a boys brain at age 13 is a briar patch of connections.   More connections does not mean better when you have an overproduction of synapses.  It actually leads to inefficient processing.

10 tips to survive the sleeplessness of parenthood

A few years ago Samuel L. Jackson did a fabulous narration of a very vulgar story book entailed Go The Fok to Sleep.  You can catch the youtube here.   Do not listen to it with your children around.  Or your parents.  Or any CPS workers.  But if you are sleep deprived and have headphones handy, it may make you laugh until you cry.

I clearly remember the time when I first realized that I wouldn't ever sleep like before.  I had a 6 week old baby and I was sitting at the kitchen table talking on the phone. That was before texting, when friends actually talked on the phone.  I asked my friend, who had a 1-year old and a 4-year old, how soon I could expect to get some sleep.  She laughed and told me she had been up the night before too.  What??  Wet beds, sick kids, nightmares, dry throats, shadows on the walls, whatever.  Parents don't sleep.  I was shocked.   Really I was.  She only had two kids!  I was so unprepared for that.  I cried.  I really did. I sat at my kitchen table and sobbed.   I just wanted 8 hours of sleep.  Was that so hard?

Um.

Yes.

It is actually impossible most nights.

Babies get up in the middle of the night, little kids get up, big kids get up.  Then your kids enter the teen years and they sleep and sleep and sleep, but they don't go to sleep until later, robbing you of any 'alone time' to decompress with your spouse.  Or you are up late waiting for them to come home.  I am told that this is precisely the age when we parents are up worrying about them rather than being physically out of bed.  Supposedly that continues through life, until you switch to worrying about your own parents.  There are also all sorts of other things that ail adults and keep us from having a good night sleep.  Some are self induced like too much caffeine, or alcohol rebound; others just part of aging -changing prostates and achy joins.  My newest nemesis's are the barking dog next door and my 8 year-old's night terrors.

So how do parents cope?  

1- Redefine your normal.  A normal night

Why we don't do slumber parties

Pizza, movie, pillow fights, popcorn and soda and yummy pancakes in the morning…

What is so bad about that?

My mom used to say "nothing good ever happens after midnight".  It used to annoy me - all the fun stuff happened after curfew right? Sometime, but that is when the trouble happens.  To get technical, because I am a stickler for statistics, I will point out that most juvenile crime actually happens in the after school hours.  But for teens and tweens trouble happens all the time. And at slumber parties there is plenty of opportunity for trouble.

I am not talking about the kids sneaking out of the house to rob the liquor store.

My angelic 11 year old doesn't run with that kind of a crew.

But he does run with the kids who would love to stay up late and play video games or pillow fight at midnight.  It is harmless kid fun and maybe a right of passage.  We let him go to just a handful of slumber parties at homes where we knew and trusted the families and they all seemed to be about the same.

Pizza, movies, pillow fights and/or massive nerf-gun battles, a fair share of junk food a lot of fun and bedtimes later than my own.

Each time we picked him up in the morning to find that he had about 4 hours of sleep and a wonderful time.  And then he got sick, or cranky and irritable.  His lack of sleep was dreadful for the entire family.

Then we tried to do the sleep over at our house thinking that we would have some semblance of control.  We ended up frustrated and tired ourselves, with the handful of boys who just didn't want to calm down at 11:30pm.   After using the mean mommy voice they calmed down, and they were respectful, but it was a slumber party after all.  And it just isn't worth it to our family.

I have memories of slumber parties that included toilet papering houses, having boys sneak in, "tummy aches" requiring my parents to pick me up, nightmare inducing shadows on the walls, and 'girl drama' that always seemed to leave someone in tears.  Luckily my best friend in junior high was like a sister to me and she stayed over a lot.  Outside of those very frequent nights with my BFF, I didn't enjoy the slumber parties as a kid.

After my sons first few slumber parties, we pulled the privilege and decided that as a family, we don't do slumber parties.  We are happy to pick our kids up at 10 or 11pm (about the time the host parents are happy to see a child go home), and our kids will sleep soundly in their own beds.

What do they miss out on?  The secret telling, the gossip, the 'who do you like?' whispers in the dark.  As they get older, maybe they will miss out on the sneaking out, or the opening-of-the-window to let the girls in - And I am okay with them missing out on all that.  They can go for the fun and leave before the parents go to be and the trouble starts.

An additional variable that we consider is the safety of our kids. I know that the families have my kids best interest at heart, but if there are older siblings in the family and they have friends over the same night, my ability to control what my child is exposed to is nonexistent.  Uncles or stepfathers I haven't met may be hanging around, neighborhood kids whose families operate with different boundaries may be there.  As kids get old enough for sleep overs, we often loosen up our watch of them.  They want privacy and we want to give them space.  But sometimes that lax supervision in a party atmosphere can lead to trouble.

My kids are my responsibility while they are young.  I want to know where they are tucked in at night.  I want to shelter them from hurtful gossip and scary situations.  Having it as a house rule has not been a problem and, like our 'no dating' rule, it has made life more simple for them. We have cousins in town and they can stay over for the night there or at their grandparent's… but outside family the answer is no.

My oldest is just 11 and I know we are just gearing up for the more difficult years.  But for now, he is relieved to have those boundaries in place.  It gives him a social 'out' and I feel like his wingman even when I am not around.  He knows mom will be here soon to get him. He should have fun while he can.   In just 7 years we will be packing his room for college and I won't be there to pick him up or tuck him in!

The Truth about the Tooth Fairy: She isn't perfect

My eleven year old son recently told us that he has know

"for like four years mom"

that the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy weren't real.  It wasn't a shock to him, but rather a slow unfolding, a mystery unveiling with each event when the supposed figure would move in-out of our lives.

The Easter Bunny only comes once a year but in a house with 3 kids who are loosing teeth and one who will someday soon begin, the Tooth Fairy might as well get her own bed and a seat at the table.  When Anthony was young, the tooth fairy (who was also younger) was a pretty reliable figure.  She showed up & paid up.  She was cheap, only offering up a quarter… but he was young and happy just to get something shiny in return for his tooth.  We even had a special little box for the teeth/coins.

As Anthony got older he started trying to find ways to increase he $$ return.  He would leave her notes explaining the amount of blood lost, or how hard he had to work to get the tooth out.  He even spent some time scrubbing one of his teeth to make it cleaner for her in hopes he may get more in return.  And it made sense because the tooth fairy was becoming more and more inconsistent as he got older.  And not just in terms of how much she left ($.25 - $2.00).

Some nights (gasp) she just didn't come.

The Grass is Always Greener: Sleep, naps & saying goodbye to mommy guilt

In parenting we have a tendency to look at our situation and think "oh, if only...".  Moms with babies and school age children sometimes fall into this as we look at how we parent our younger children differently.  We can have almost a nostalgic recollection of what family life was like with just the one.   I am as guilty as the rest of assuming my baby & the rest of us were suffering from her status as last born...until Easter break came and we were able to bend our schedule to hers.  What a mistake!

Things that go bump in the night

Nightmares are horrible.  So is sleeplessness.  Think back to the last nightmare you had.  Don't think ABOUT that nightmare - just think about what you did- chances are you didn't just roll over and go back to sleep.  So don't expect your child to be able to do that. They need you and they need your help.
A few nights ago Gracie had a nightmare.  Now all my kids have handled their bad dream episodes a little differently.  My eldest was the worst - Anthony would be up for hours.  He would be fairly inconsolable and almost argumentative at times.   When he was 9 we had our house blessed and he finally got a pretty good handle on them.  JR seems to have a bad night every once in a while but he seems to be not fully awake even when he is complaining about the dream.   And Gracie, well she is just sweet about them.  She will sometimes tell us in the morning that she was up "all night" because of a bad dream.

I had moments of panic myself when I thought of all four kids having the same type of nightmares that Anthony had.  Maybe we have worked out way into some good strategies, maybe the other kids are just easier.  Anthony is old enough now to be more logical about the scary times.  Regardless, here are some good strategies for the middle of the night scary times.