As parents, we all run into the occasional night where are toddlers or kids resist bedtime.

They just don’t want to go to sleep, and even if we have a routine established, they put up a fuss. If you had a bad day and are short tempered, you can easily let it turn into a fight with your kids. If you are more relaxed about it and flexible with your thinking, you can often just turn the situation around before it ever evolves into something difficult.

Remember that kids just want to do things that they deem fun, comforting, or somehow satisfying. As a parent, if you get resistance from your child, you can turn that into co-operation if you transform what you are doing into something that is more fun, more comforting, or more satisfying.

Here’s a recent example. My oldest daughter was watching Berstein Bears in our bedroom during “quiet time” before bed. My wife had already taken my youngest daughter off to brush teeth and cuddle, and I was giving my older daughter another 15 minutes. When the cartoon ended, I told her it was time for bed, as usual. She put up a whiny fuss about it and I knew I had to change the direction of the situation right away, or I’d risk a tantrum. At the very least, it would just set the wrong tone for bedtime and it would take longer to get her settled.

What I did: I was standing at the edge of the bed telling her it was time for bed, and I had the remote in my hand to turn off the TV. If I simply turned it off, I risked killing our rapport and turning the whining into a big fight. So I playfully tossed the remote onto the mattress beside her. She knows how to hit the “off” button so I gave her a little challenge. I told her, “Ok sweetie … I’m going to give you a 20 second head start and then I’m going to crawl over to the TV and I’m going to turn it off. I wonder if you’ll beat me to it.”

I started (again, playfully) counting to 20. By the time I got to 4 she was into it and didn’t want to wait. She said, “Daddy – just go, start crawling.” I did exactly that. I got onto the floor and started creeping over to the TV like I was some kind of lion or tiger. I got halfway there when she turned the TV off and declared victory. I laughed, she laughed, and I carried her off to bed like the little princess that she is.

The whole “fuss” lasted all of 10 seconds. I didn’t negotiate with her or demand instant compliance with my wishes. That’s not the right way to handle it. It’s much easier, in my experience, to create a more compelling reason for her to want to go along with the routine. I just turned it into a game and that seemed more fun than a cartoon. I knew it would work (or at least I had a pretty good feeling it would) because we play games all the time. So I’m not telling you that this will work for you exactly as I’ve described it. Use your own instincts. But the same principles apply.

You can get more flies with honey than with vinegar … that’s what my Mom always used to tell me. Boy, was she smart.

I just finished putting my girls to bed tonight.  Like most parents, we read to our kids at night.  Kids often have their favorite books that they like to have read to them over and over again.  That’s fine – it goes back to establishing a pattern at bed time, which we talked about in a prior post.

When you read to your kids, you probably notice that almost every kids story book has a theme, or a message in the story.  Sometimes it can be tempting for a parent to analyze that message in a discussion with the child.  I’m here to tell you that this is a bad idea.

You need to realize that most learning is actually done unconsciously.  That is, with the unconscious (or some people say sub-conscious) mind.  Almost everything that you have learned in life was learned in this unconscious way.  You learned it before you became consciously aware of the learning.  Kids learn this exact same way.

If you explain a story to a child, then you are messing with the process of unconscious learning.  Don’t turn an unconscious process into a conscious process.  Trust me, it is a mistake.

I have been studying Ericksonian Hypnosis for a long time.  The late (and great) Milton H. Erickson was probably the best hypnotherapist that ever lived.  He was a truly incredible man.  He often performed “hypnosis” by telling stories.  These stories would be told to adults, and the hidden message within the story would serve to teach the patient something at the unconscious level.  Milton never explained the stories – because he knew that this would totally wreck the therapeutic results (i.e. the learning would be interfered with).

Hypnotic stories are really no different than the kinds of stories that we tell our children.  In fact, Milton Erickson often told stories to his children.  I wasn’t there to see how he did it, but I’m sure he never explained them.  He let them work their magic below the child’s conscious awareness.

Learn from Milton.  Read stories, tell stories and never explain them.

If you enjoyed this post you should check out my audio program for parents of toddlers.  It will help you to solve child behavior problems and enjoy a less stressful parenting career.

Enjoy your children,
Chris Thompson

When your toddler doesn’t want to go to bed, it can be stressful for parents. In my last post, I talked about what to do in the case of a toddler who simply feels he or she will be missing out on the fun of staying awake. This post will talk about what to do if your toddler is scared of bedtime.

Why would a toddler be scared of bedtime? It could stem from a fear of the dark, fear of separation from the parents, fear of not waking up, or the all-too-common “there are monsters under my bed!”.

But I want to tell you that worrying about “why” your toddler is scared is the wrong approach. Parents should instead focus on what and how the fear manifests itself in a child. Fear comes from the pictures we make in our minds and the things that we say to ourselves. If we change the pictures (make better movies in our minds) and if we say more useful things to ourselves, we won’t be so scared.

With a young toddler, you can’t always explain this directly. So instead, you need an indirect approach. You need to teach your toddler, in an unconscious way, that bed time is safe, cozy, comfortable and fun.

Yelling at your child to stay in bed is not the answer! I hope this is clear by now. If you do yell, you simply add one more “scary” thing to the laundry list of issues that might be causing fear for your child.

If your toddler tells you he is scared of the dark, you need to make the dark seem more fun. I’ll give you two examples of how to do this without trying to directly tell your child “the dark is fun”. Because that direct explanation is too logical for an emotional problem. You need to correct it by causing your toddler to give himself different internal messages about what “darkness” means in the context of his own bedroom.

Method 1: Put glow in the dark stickers on your child’s wall and ceiling. Then, after leaving the lights on to let the stickers “charge up”, lie in bed with your toddler after the lights are off. Tell him a story about how you love to just pretend you are in a wonderful, safe forest looking up at the stars on a beautiful clear night. Now, if your child is scared of the forest, then say something else! But this type of “story telling” combined with something new (the glow in the dark stickers), can create an instant change in the way your child perceives bed.

Method 2: GIve your child a small flashlight to shine around the room. Lie with him and let him shine it around the ceiling. Show him how fast movements of the flashlight will create a tracer effect. This will interest almost all children and they will become so entranced with the flashlight that they forget about how they used to be scared of the dark.

These methods both serve to “anchor” a safe feeling or a fun feeling to being in bed in the dark at night. There are plenty of other methods that will work as well, and if you listen to my Talking to Toddlers audio course you’ll gain enough knowledge to make up your own methods that will be perfectly suited to your own child, and help you improve child behavior.

Enjoy your children,
Chris Thompson

Based on my research, one of the most common problems parents face is that their toddler doesn’t want to go to bed. I’d like to explore this problem and discuss ways that you can solve it more or less permanently. I say “more or less” because patterns that you get your child into will always be in flux, but once you get the pattern installed, it’s just like driving. All you need to do is keep your eye on the road and adjust the steering wheel when needed.

When toddlers don’t want to go to bed it is usually for one of a few simple reasons. Either they think they are missing out on the fun that happens when they sleep, or they are somehow scared of their bedroom, or of the dark.
In this post, we’ll tackle only the first scenario. This is, in my experience, the most common. Kids are simply having too much fun and they don’t want it to end. If you were to ask (or give them the option), they’d tell you they want to stay up all night. They just don’t know any better, and it’s kinda cute if you ask me.

So how do you deal with this? You need to establish bedtime as something that is also fun. In fact, if you can make sure that bedtime is actually more fun than whatever else is going on, you’ll have even better success.

Here are 5 quick tips you can use to make bedtime more fun and less of a fight:

1. Make the process of going to bed into a game. With my monkey-girl, we regularly get her to “go hide” under her sheets, and then we pretend we can’t find her for a minute or two. She lies there giggling, just waiting for us to find her. It is so cute and she loves it.
2. Do an activity together. Reading books, telling stories, or playing make-believe are all great. My daughter loves french toast, and we’ll often lie in her bed together pretending to make french toast with an imaginary frying pan, imaginary toast, eggs, etc. Then she eats it up and we kiss goodnight.
3. Talk about fun things. Get your toddler in the habit of looking forward to tomorrow. Talk about what will be fun to do tomorrow. Especially when the kindergarten years approach, looking forward to school will be important to establishing a pattern of really enjoying learning.
4. Get good at using your soothing voice when you’re tucking your child into bed. For most parents this is already automatic, but if you are in the habit of tucking in your toddler using your normal daytime voice, change this immediately. You want your night time voice to condition a night-time response from your child.
5. Recognize that patterns will change with time. Once you get your child into the habit of enjoying the bedtime ritual, you are in great shape. But the actual specifics of the ritual will (and should) change over time. Story books and activities change. What we talk about changes. The games we play to get into bed vary. Change is the only constant in life, and this is even more true with kids!

Next post we’ll talk about what you can do if your child is scared of bedtime for whatever reason. Until then, enjoy your children. If you enjoyed this post, then you’ll love my parenting audio book.

Chris Thompson