Many years ago I was asked to give a presentation that would address concerns about bedtime for children. I wasn’t sure what title to give this presentation.  I thought perhaps, “Helping Your Child Prepare for Bed,” or “Making Bedtime Easier for Your Children and for You.”  The menahales who had requested this presentation said that those titles were nice but didn’t really capture the mentality of the parents she thought would most benefit from my lecture.  I asked her what she meant by “the mentality of the parents” and she said the parents she was concerned about were not imagining making bedtime easy for anybody. They just wanted it to be less extremely awful and that’s what they would want to hear from me.  I said, “what about calling it Dreading Bedtime,” and she said, “that title they would relate to.”

Empathy is a wonderful thing.  Empathy allows you to relate to someone else by learning from her what an experience is like for her, not what it would be like for you.  If you were exhausted after schlepping around shopping for clothing and school supplies for most of the day, you’d like nothing better than to get to bed early.  If you’d been given an extra slice of dessert and had three books read to you, you’d thankfully go into your bed upon request and happily drift off to sleep.
If you knew that your mother and father had both been through a long, hard day of work and concerns about you and your siblings, you’d stay out of their way and go to bed without even being reminded.   That’s what it would be like for you.  

It’s not like that for your child.   All he knows is that he’d rather stay up than be bored in his bed, lying there not falling asleep, and missing out on who knows what that is going on in the rest of the house.

It is empathy when you, an adult, know how much you want to stay up later even though you’re going to be tired and performing sub-par the whole next day, and you understand that your child feels the same way.   It requires the self-awareness and humility of a young morah who told me that she does much better in both presentation and classroom management when she’s gotten enough sleep, but not nearly as well when she’s tired.  I asked her how does that happen, what is it that she is stressed about when she can’t fall asleep and ends up tired the next day.  She told me that once she goes to bed, she usually falls asleep just fine, that’s not the problem.  The problem is that she sometimes doesn’t go to bed when she thinks she should because she doesn’t want to miss out on what’s going on in the rest of the house.   Those were her words.  I hope by now she has children of her own and can express the empathy she clearly has available on this subject.
Empathy informs us that Dreading Bedtime is a term that applies to both parents and children.  I wanted the parents who attended that presentation to realize that they could use the parallel experience of bedtime to their disadvantage or their advantage.  Because bedtime is a parallel experience for parents and children, parents who struggle with it tend to have children who struggle with it and parents who are calmer at bedtime tend to have calmer bedtime children.  D’varim ha’yotzim min ha-lev nichasim el ha-lev applies to anxiety and tension, as well as to tranquility and calm.

To illustrate this point, and another one, I began the lecture as follows:

I appreciate your taking the time to attend this lecture on a topic that I know is very important to you. You want your children to be well rested so they can perform well in school and stay healthy. Because this material is very important to you, I want you to be well rested so that you can focus and retain all of what I am going to teach you today.  So right now for just five minutes I want all of you to close your eyes and go to sleep.  Why are you smiling at me?  I’m serious.  I’d like you to take a five minute nap and then I’ll continue.  Close your eyes and go to sleep.  Stop fidgeting; close your eyes and go to sleep.  NOW! GO TO SLEEP!  

There was a five second pause, and then I said, in a soft voice:  How soothing was that for you?  How calm and sleepy did you feel when I said that to you the way I did?

They got the first point right away:  Being yelled at to go to sleep rarely helps anybody get to sleep. The second point is this: do you anyone who can fall asleep on request?  Even if you calmly, gently, ask them nicely?  I don’t.   You can ask someone to stay in her bed, but to command someone to go to sleep?  How does that work?   It’s a simple and important shift for you to make.  Stop telling your child, “go to sleep.” Instead, tell your child, “please stay in your bed.”  And say it as calmly as you’re able to.

When he replies, “but I can’t fall asleep,” you say, “that’s okay.  I hope you’ll fall asleep soon, please stay in your bed,” as calmly as you are able to say it.

You don’t know my child.  She’ll yell from her bed 6 times that she can’t fall asleep, and this can go on for an hour.  What am I supposed to do?

I’ve always found that to be a fascinating question.  I usually answer that question by asking, “supposed to according to whom?”  If you’re asking me, I would want to know if you want me to tell you how to make your child leave you alone while she can’t fall asleep, or if you want me to help you help your child who can’t fall asleep.
If your question is, “how can I get my child to leave me alone when she can’t fall asleep,” the answer is to find someone who can help her, whether it is your spouse, a sibling, or someone else.

If your question is, “how can I help her when she’s having such a tough time falling asleep,” I would refer you first to yourself. What do you do for yourself when you’re having a tough time falling asleep?  Think about that and talk it over with your daughter.  Maybe after a pleasant conversation with you in which she finds out that you’re not angry at her for having trouble falling asleep, she’ll fall asleep.


Rabbi Yitzchak Shmuel Ackerman is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with specialties in marriage, relationships, and parenting.  He works with parents and educators, and conducts parenting seminars for shuls and organizations.  He can be reached at 718-344-6575.