Lawyer Michael Fenrick, 36, reads his daughter Isadora a bedtime story at their home in Toronto, Ontario, Wednesday, October 8, 2014.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Putting my toddler to bed always starts reasonably enough. Eventually, however, I become like John Turturro begging Gabriel Byrne to spare his life in Miller's Crossing – kneeling, hands clasped together, desperate. "Look in your heart!"
When it's over, one of us is asleep and one of us is downstairs feeling like a jerk and a failure. Did I mention the yelling? There can be yelling.
The more I yell, the more stubborn my son becomes. And then I dig in even deeper: "Get into bed right now, or no bedtime books!" Because how can I be losing a battle of the wills here?
"I call this the 'You're not the boss of me' syndrome," says Terry Carson, a Toronto-based parenting expert. "You really need to understand that these power struggles don't come from nowhere."
If you don't, everyone's behaviour simply becomes more entrenched. "You end up with this habit in your home of always nagging, or always begging, or always yelling," she says.
Which is why losing your cool, and yelling at kids to go up to bed right now or they won't get any stories tonight, is just more of the problem, not a solution.
"The child is basically saying to you, in their own coded way, 'I want to be independent,'" Carson explains. "To get more co-operative behaviour, we have to give them some power."
Carson suggests putting your children in charge of the bedtime schedule. Take them shopping and let them pick out a whiteboard and markers. Let them lay out (with your guidance) the three or four things they need to do each night to get ready for bed – brushing teeth, getting in their jammies, whatever. It's the child's job to do all of these things. It's the child's job to put a check mark next to each task on the schedule. It's the child's job to get all this done within a certain amount of time. Carson suggests one hour.
And your job?
"Your job is to do nothing," Carson says.
It may take three or four weeks for kids to manage their schedules well and to understand that the quicker they accomplish their tasks, the more story time they get before lights out.
You're there to go over the schedule each week to talk about how performance can be improved, not scold them for failing to brush their teeth on Wednesday night.
And while you might do something nice with your child at the end of the week, there are no explicit punishments or rewards in this system.
"The consequence [for the child] is, 'I'm trying to build your skill set to self-manage,'" Carson says.
Sounds a lot better than begging and yelling, doesn't it?
Dave McGinn