Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 27

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