Why do I have to go to bed first?

The one thing that I have gotten right for my son is his bedtime. Occasionally we may have a little blip where he wont pick a book or takes a while to brush his teeth but on the whole our bedtime routine is great. We read two books, I sit with him for 5 minutes and then I say night night. Once I have said night night I walk away and hes asleep within minutes. And I have been so pleased with that. 99.9% of my time with my son is hard work and so having this 1% that seems to go smoothly has been great. Until lately…….when he asks every night….

“Why do I have to go to bed first?”

This is very ironic as my son likes to be first for everything. We are first on the playground at school, he is first in the queue to be out of school, he likes to be first in the house, first out the house and so on and so on, yet he doesn’t want to be first to bed!!! The simple answer is he is the youngest and he needs more sleep than anyone else. But when I have said that to him he isn’t happy with it. And since he started asking this question our bedtimes have gotten steadily worse until Monday night when it was the worst one (have I said I hate Mondays!!!). He spent the best part of an hour to an hour and a half sobbing that he was not going to sleep and it wasn’t fair that he had to go to bed earlier than anyone else. I basically just ignored him, tried to eat my tea and just checked on him every 5-10 mins or so. He did eventually drop off but of course we were then in a vicious circle where he was tired the next day, bedtime would be even worse and it would just perpetuate.  I needed a strategy, something tangible that would explain why he went to bed earlier than everyone else. And in the middle of the night the answer came to me. And I was shocked that I hadn’t thought of it before. He needed more sleep because he was younger and so he had more growing to do and so in order to make sure he grew bigger he needed more sleep. All I needed to do was measure him before bed, and then measure him the day after. It was like a lightbulb moment for me which held a lot of significance and I will tell you why.

In the run up to my son’s 4th birthday he was so so excited. He couldn’t wait to be 4 years old. The night before, he kept talking about it. He went to sleep and I set all his presents up ready for the next day. When he woke he was not excited at all. The word I would use to describe it was “panicked and traumatised”. He immediately asked me

Him: “Am I 4 years old?”

Me: “Yes”

Him: “I’m not 4 years old, I’m still 3 years old”

Me: “its your birthday today and you are 4 years old”

“I’m not, I’m still 3 years old” – he said this while looking at himself and padding himself down. And this is the event just summarised. In reality he was so upset.

He just couldn’t believe he was 4. 

This went on for a while. I actually have photos of him laid on the floor next to his presents sobbing because he thought he wasn’t 4 years old. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, just thought the excitement had tipped him over the edge and left it at that until the following year when it was coming up to his birthday again and I remembered how he had been. By this point I had been receiving some support from a local charity who rang me monthly and discussed various strategies for me to use. On one of the phone calls I explained I was feeling nervous about his upcoming birthday and explained what had happened last year. They immediately knew that what my son required was something to measure how he was different. They suggested measuring his height on his birthday and then next year measuring him again so we could show him how much he had grown. He needed to see how being 4 was different to being 5 because the reality is you don’t feel any different and that is what he was expecting. He was expecting to feel different so by measuring him one year then comparing it to the next year he would see a difference. This wouldn’t help me at this late stage as I hadn’t measured him on his birthday last year but I thought I would tell a little white lie to make his birthday easier for him. On the night before his birthday I measured him – he was 116cm. I told him I would measure him on his birthday and we would see how much he had grown.  He went to bed and as soon as he woke up the first thing he asked for was to be measured…I of course was going to tell him he now measured 117cm but when I measured him he actually did measure 117cm. I could not believe it!!!!! He had actually grown 1 cm overnight. Now he was absolutely buzzing and his birthday went smoothly. No tears, no dramas, just happiness that he was 5, and because I had measured him and it was different he knew he was 5. And I was absolutely amazed. Firstly that it had worked but mostly because I hadn’t had to lie, he had actually grown!! Who would have thought it? 

Of course throughout the course of the day I told everyone this story….did you know my son grew 1 cm overnight?…….and it turns out that everybody does grow. Well actually you don’t grow 1cm overnight but more you shrink throughout the course of the day. I mean with the weight of the world I am carrying round on my shoulders I probably shrink a good 3 or 4 cm throughout the day. So there is a difference of around 1cm if you measure yourself on a night to a morning. It wasn’t a birthday miracle. It was just science! But I knew I was going to measure him every birthday like this. It worked and I was happy with it, better yet my son was over the moon with it.

On New Years Eve we had similar issues whereby my son was very concerned with the year changing and straight way I knew I needed to measure him in 2023 and then again in 2024 so that he knew that it was different. Again he was taller the next morning and it stopped any major incidents on waking. And so of course in order to make sure our bedtimes went easy I now needed to measure him. Now I couldn’t measure him every night because the 1 cm trick didn’t work like that but I would have to measure him periodically and pray he had grown just a tiny bit.

I told him that he had to go to bed earlier than everyone else as he wanted to be taller than everyone else (he frequently asked me why he was the smallest in the family….more on that another week) he needed to sleep, and to sleep well as that is when you do your growing and to prove it I would measure him before and after bed. And that is what we did. This time he was 119cm then 120cm. And he was over the moon. 

And I was too, as he went straight to sleep and slept well for him…only 1 wake up instead of the 4 or 5 we had recently been having. I just hope he doesn’t ask to be measured again tonight……