The Mad Bedtime Dash

Quite often we make a mad homework dash because we want the kids to have enough hours of sleep each day. When they don't have enough sleep, they get fretful and irritable and tend to fall sick easily. So in our quest to make sure the kids have enough sleep, we rush them to complete their homework, preferably before dinner time which is at 7pm.

After dinner, it's getting ready for bedtime, and that means washing up, brushing teeth, changing into pyjamas, then light reading for about 15 minutes before lights off at 8.30pm. That is our ideal situation or the situation in which we hope to have. In order to achieve that, we make our mad homework dash.

Sometimes the mad homework dash continues after dinner and homework gets completed at 9pm, that's when the bedtime dash gets crazier and lights get turned off immediately after teeth brushing and changing into night clothes. No winding down.

The kids are usually asleep by 9pm, the very latest is 10pm but usually 9pm or even before that at times. They get up at 5.45am or 6pm the latest. 9pm to 6pm is 9 hours of sleep each night. They no longer have afternoon naps.

How many hours of sleep do children need? Well according to this article on Child Sleep - Recommended hours for every age , my children who are in the age bracket between 7 to 12 years old, should be getting about 10 to 11 hours of sleep each day. They are only having 9 hours each day and we are unable to make it possible for them to have more hours than that each day. I know if we can find the time for them, they will easily be able to sleep another 1 hour or two but we can't, we just can't with their workload.....

We try to catch up during the weekend by allowing them to get up later. They usually get up at 8 or 9pm during the weekends but they would have to go to bed at the same time in order to get more sleep. However there is this tendency to allow them to stay up later as well so in the end, the still only get about 9 hours of sleep during the weekends.

Changing the bedtimes from 10-11pm till 8-9am during the weekends is a bad practice but we still do it. I wonder how do other parents manage in the area of sleep. Care to share?