London - Guilty secrets are the lifeblood of motherhood.
I’m not talking about wearing your PJs on the school run, blasting away the sleep cobwebs by dancing to Justin Bieber or slipping baby rice in the late-night bottle to make them sleep longer sort of secrets.
I’m talking about more shameful stuff, such as the mornings you bribed the smallest child with strawberry jelly for breakfast to get her to school on time or when you left the whole lot watching an age-inappropriate film on TV so you could finish a phone call in peace or the giant bump on your son’s head that you ignored because you couldn’t bear going to A&E again that month.
This is the stuff they don’t put in those self-help parenting books. The stuff you blurt out when you’ve had too much to drink with your least responsible mom friend, on whom you rely to tell you a parenting story so bad you’ll feel like entering the Mom Olympics by the time she’s reached the ‘and then it all caught fire’ closing line.
This week I’m coming clean on my guilty secret: on Fridays my four-year-old goes to bed at 10pm. Lately, her bedtime routine has become erratic and fraught with emotion. Consequently, she seems to be heading to the land of nod later and later.
Mabel is the last of four children so we’ve tackled all manner of sleep issues before, but this one is perplexing.
She gets into bed quite happily at 7.30pm, but it takes an age before she’ll release me or Dad from the room, then a little voice calls out from upstairs: ‘What are you all doing down there?’
The quizzing continues until she appears in the kitchen clutching Owly, her tiny face crestfallen, to witness life carrying on without her and her siblings enjoying ‘adult TV’. She’s clearly thinking: ‘How dare they have a party and not invite me!’
When we take her back to bed, she becomes distraught and overwhelmed with what she calls ‘the sadness’.
Though I am much tougher than Mr Candy when it comes to discipline (he never wants to be the bad guy), we’ve both cracked on this and come to an agreement: if she goes to bed during the week she can lie on the sofa under a blanket on a Friday night.
We came to this agreement after trying, and failing, the latest cure-all for sleep avoidance — the so-called ‘bedtime pass’ routine.
This is when you make an actual physical pass and give it to your under-ten-year-old, explaining they can use it once a week to come downstairs to satisfy whatever feeble excuse they have for being out of bed, and then they go back up.
Apparently, the knowledge they can get out of bed gives them control over the routine because they choose when to use the pass. It’s worked all over the US.
Mabel was quite firm about the bedtime pass (she put it in the bin).
We have tried threatening to shut the door, putting her to bed at 8.30pm, putting her to bed at 7pm and pretending it was 9pm and getting her 13-year-old sister to take her to bed and pretend she, too, was heading off to sleep.
But short of putting sleeping pills in her water bottle, nothing seemed to keep her in that bedroom.
However, last week the ‘Friday night deal’, which took over an hour to negotiate, appeared to do the trick.
‘What’s the worst that can happen by keeping her up late?’ Mr Candy argued.
By 10pm they were both asleep on the sofa in front of the TV. I carried Mabel to bed, but left him there until the morning.
Is it wrong for a four-year-old to have a really late night once a week? Will she become a juvenile delinquent, as all the sleep studies seem to show?
When I told a friend about it, she said her two-year-old doesn’t get to bed until 9pm (but happily sleeps through until 9am the next day).
Other parents have all sorts of sleep secrets to tell, so I am refusing to feel guilty about inviting Mabel to the party on a Fridaynight.
And, as my 12-year-old pointed out, Friday nights in our house are ‘so boring she’ll soon work out it’s far more interesting to go to bed on time anyway’.
Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor in chief of Elle magazine.