A Spoonful of Sugar. Liz Fraser
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routine, routine
When I left home at the grand old age of seventeen I felt a colossal sense of loss. Really, it was like having a huge hole ripped out of my stomach, and I felt totally rootless for a while. Of course, I loved that I was finally going out into the great big world by myself – that was the most exhilarating feeling ever for an adventurous sort like me, and as soon as I could I packed a huge rucksack and set off around the world on my own for six months – but leaving the place I grew up in was a painful wrench and when my parents sold the place a decade or so ago I couldn’t even go back to help them with the move. It had to stay in my mind just as it was: patterns in the cracked paint that had been there for years making shapes that became my companions, of strange faces, animals or faraway islands; marks on the walls where, in a moment of wilfulness, I’d scribbled the name of someone I fancied; the smell of the lounge carpet in the sunshine; the reflection of the bay window on the top of the piano – all of it had to remain just like that.
What made me so attached to my home was, oddly enough, not the people who were there (they are still around, even though they’re in a new place now), but the incredibly strong sense of routine that was present: every day, from the age of six, I’d get up at the same time, catch the school bus at the same time, come home at the same time, have dinner, a bath, go to bed, read and sleep. Weekends were for music lessons and practice, walking the dog, homework, jobs around the house and family time. The same things, every week, for years and years. It was constancy, a familiar, known rhythm, which gave me a huge amount of comfort and security when times weren’t quite so rosy. Even through the turbulent teenage years when I was, according to reliable sources, ‘a bloody nightmare’ to live with, my routine changed very little and my house – the building itself – was a passive, non-judgemental observer of all who lived in it, which made me like it all the more.
I wonder what Granny thinks about routine and the importance of setting out some patterns and rhythms in a house with children? Is it good for them, and should we be trying to stick to routines that work for us? Or do they need more flexibility and irregular patterns in their lives?
‘Routine is vital for a child, oh yes,’ she tells me emphatically. ‘And the most important one is bedtime.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, just think about it: I hear of parents who just cannot get their kids to bed in the evening – but they’re watching the television until two minutes before bed! How can they ever sleep then?!’
Granny’s Pearl of Wisdom
You have to establish a very clear routine of calming children down in the hour before it’s time to go to bed – the same every day. A child will learn that and then settle down very easily.
Mica, who has been out for all of about five minutes, now wants to come in. Maybe that’s part of his routine, and Granny’s is to open and shut the door.
‘So what kind of a routine did your kids have before bed?’
‘Well, the most important thing was to get some peace before bed time. It helps to settle them. So they’d all have a bath together – by the end of the day they were filthy! – and I’d give them all a good soaping. When your dad was born we had no electricity and he’d be bathed in a big zinc tub in front of the fire.’
I feel a brief moment of ‘ohhh, poor little thing!’ before remembering this is my dad we’re talking about, and he was hardly a shrinking violet – the pictures I’ve seen of him as a baby suggest the zinc bath was likely to come off rather worse than he did. Bless his cotton socks (if they had any back then …).
‘And did you have a rigid bedtime?’
‘Oh yes. The children were all in bed by half past seven until they were at least ten or so. Then we started to let it get a little later – they had homework and music practice. But you have to have a routine in place; otherwise they’ll stay up half the night and get exhausted.’
This point about exhaustion is one I discuss ad flipping nauseam with my eldest who seems to think that she is the ‘only person in my whole claaaass!!’ who goes to bed this side of midnight. (She is not. I’ve checked.) Sadly, what happens when she gets less than ten hours’ sleep for two days running is that she gets shadows under her eyes that could well land me in jail for child neglect and cold sores on her mouth that are both unsightly and painful. The fact is that she needs sleep, and thus needs to go to bed early!
THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
The amount we need to sleep changes a lot with age, and also with how much activity (mental and physical) we do. Each person is different, and the amount we need varies from day to day. Know your child, and what he can cope with, and adjust accordingly.
An average toddler needs about eleven hours’ sleep per night, plus a nap in the day of an hour or so, while a child of ten doesn’t have a nap in the day at all, but still needs about ten hours’ sleep. By the time they hit adolescence children can get by with about eight and a half or nine hours’ sleep per night, but many don’t get half that amount because they’re up late, watching telly or out with friends.
School-aged children need to get enough sleep so that they can concentrate on their work, learn and behave well at school. Establish a sensible bedtime which enables this amount of sleep, and stick to it as much as possible.
Sleep is a basic need of the human body and prolonged periods of not getting enough can result in serious difficulties concentrating, working and keeping well. Kids are growing and learning at a phenomenal rate and generally using up a lot of energy all the time – they need sleep to recuperate!
Getting enough sleep can become a real battleground as kids get older because they want to stay up later to feel ‘grown up’. Sadly this does them no good if they are becoming sleep-deprived. Try to explain that sending them to bed is not a punishment – it’s what they need to learn, grow and be healthy. Even if you can bring bedtime forward by fifteen minutes, that’s a good step.
Now, all of this routine is something I believe in very strongly, but, to be quite honest, I think a completely rigid and unmove-able routine is not so very helpful. Children do need to learn that sometimes things change and we can’t always do what we’d like, or what we usually do. It teaches them flexibility; the ability to cope when things change.
For me, there was probably a little bit too much routine, though I’d say at least half of this was self-imposed, and I did develop some rather obsessive-compulsive tendencies from quite a young age that I used as a safety net. So long as the alarm clock rang six times, I got out of bed with my right foot and the bathroom light went on before I stepped into the room, all was well. That kind of thing. It can be hard to adapt to ‘unknowns’ if you are brought up with immoveable routines, so I’d advocate having a clear system throughout the week, but letting this shift ever so slightly as new things present themselves.
We still stick to a ‘no screen-time after dinner, bath, stories, lights out’ routine every night and have done for over ten years so far – but if there’s the odd one where we’re travelling or we’ve got friends round then it all goes out of the window for a day. Life is too short to be totally anal about these things – one night a month isn’t going to harm your kids!
So bedtime routine is important. What about other routines in the family home – is it helpful to have systems in place, patterns of activities and some kind of a rhythm in a home?
Granny thinks it is: ‘Listen, you don’t want to run a home like an army, with Mummy blowing her whistle when it’s time for dinner, or time to do homework. But if you can have some kind of routine each day it just makes life so much easier!’
‘For