Why am I so bad at bedtime as a parent?
Everyone's finally asleep...
The toys are scattered across the floor
The dishwasher's humming awa
The house is quiet.
But instead of feeling relieved...
...your brain starts replaying the day...
The moment you snapped
The tone of your voice
The look on your child's face
The bedtime that ended in shouting
Again.
You don't replay the cuddle afterwards
Or the story you still read
Or the fact you went back in for 'just one more hug'.
Instead, your mind is busy building a case against you.
"I should have handled that better."
"Why can't I stay calm?"
"What's wrong with me?"
"I'm failing."
One thing I've noticed...
One thing I've noticed in the therapy room is that parents don't come to therapy because bedtime is difficult. They come because of what bedtime has made them believe about themselves.
They don't usually say,
"Bedtime's really hard"
They say,
"I'm such a bad parent."
Somewhere along the way, one difficult bedtime stops being just one difficult bedtime and it becomes evidence...
Evidence that you're impatient
Evidence that you're getting it wrong
Evidence that you're failing
And that's a very heavy thing to carry into tomorrow.
The hardest part isn't always bedtime.
Of course bedtime can be hard; everyone's tired, you've spent all day meeting other people's needs, your child's running on fumes, you're running on fumes. It's hardly surprising that patience sometimes wears thin.
But I don't actually think that's the hardest part. I think the hardest part is the story that begins afterwards. Because once you've reached the conclusion,
"I'm failing"
your mind starts looking for more evidence.
So you collect, tomorrow's difficult breakfast, next week's tantrum, another evening where everyone ends up crying.
They all get added to the same pile.
Until it starts feeling less like parenting...
...and more like proof.
I wonder...
I wonder if there's a difference between saying,
"That bedtime didn't go how I'd hoped."
and
"I'm failing."
One describes what happened.
The other describes who you've started believing you are.
Those aren't the same thing.
And yet when we're exhausted, stressed and overwhelmed, it's so easy for those two things to become tangled together.
Maybe that's where we need to begin.
Not with another bedtime routine
Not with another parenting tip
Not with trying even harder tomorrow
But by becoming curious about the conclusions we've reached about ourselves.
The hardest part of parenting isn't bedtime; it's carrying the belief that one difficult bedtime says everything about the kind of parent you are.
I'd love to invite you...
If you've recognised yourself anywhere in this, I'd love to invite you to watch my free online class:
When Parenting Is Draining You
Together we'll explore why parenting can leave us feeling so overwhelmed, where we'll explore the conclusions we've reached about ourselves as parents, and why questioning those conclusions can change the way we experience parenting.
You won't become a perfect parent.
But you might stop carrying quite so much of the weight you've been carrying on your own.
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