Bedtime, shmedtime...

So I read an online article from "Today's Parent", a Canadian parenting magazine that I stopped reading somewhere around the time the first kid was six months old, because I found it to be filled with idiotic suggestions on how to raise children. It also made me feel somewhat inadequate, since I was quite obviously not parenting the way the magazine and its panel of experts thought I should.

However, once in a while, I would pick up a copy (usually the free one from the doctor's office), open it up to peruse its pages, only to fling it back down again in disgust.

This morning I thought I'd try again.

And once again, I find myself wanting to hurl the magazine through a window (I didn't, what with it being the online version I was reading and not really wanting to damage the laptop).

"Today's Parent" offered up ideas on how to have a calm bedtime routine for families with crazy schedules. The suggestions were things like play for an hour after dinner, bath time, reading with each child for at least half an hour to an hour before turning out the lights and letting the little darlings drift gently into dreamland.

The problem I have with this? They interviewed two families. That's right, two. Deux. Dos. One family had two children, the other? One. Two families witha grand total of three children. The first family's complaint was that it sometimes took two hours to get the children to bed after dinner. The second family was a single mom (whose ex also follows the bedtime routine) of a four year old who doesn't go to sleep until 8:30 or 9 pm.

There are a few things here that make my blood boil. First of all, this article is designed to help make bedtime simple for families where the maximum number of children is two. I have four children. If I was to follow this hare-brained scheme, my children wouldn't be turning the lights out until 10 pm. And what four year old still needs to be awake at 9 pm? I wasn't allowed to stay up that late until I was 16 years old.

The parents of the two children in the article have different parenting styles (so who doesn't?)...the mother likes to have a fashion show with the kids, the dad likes to jump on a trampoline with them to "burn off energy after dinner". Huh? Any exercise expert will tell you that getting your heart rate up doesn't calm you down, it revs you up. And does so for hours afterwards, and that you should not exercise within three hours of going to bed. How on earth does jumping around help calm this guy's kids?

We call after - dinner time around here the "crazy hour". It does not matter whether or not we play calm games with the children (and with four of them between the ages of 4 and 8, no game is ever quiet and gentle), dance 'til our buns fall off or read for two solid hours, after dinner is when the children go nuts.

We accept this. We do not look for solutions to try and change our children. We just look at the clock, mutter a slow countdown under our breath (only 45 more minutes, only 30 more minutes, only...), close their bedroom doors and by 7:30 pm, breathe a giant sigh of relief that we have made it through another day without eating our young.