A few months ago I was trying to figure out how to make bedtime go better with Nora (3y). She would go very slowly through the process, primarily by being silly. She'd run away playfully when it was time to brush her teeth, or close her mouth and hum, or lie on the ground and wiggle. She wanted to play, I wanted to get her to bed on time.
I decided to start offering her "silly time", which was 5-10min of playing together after she was fully ready for bed. If she wanted silly time she needed to move promptly through the routine, and being silly together was more fun than what she'd been doing.
This worked well, and we would play a range of games:
Standing on a towel on our bed (which is on the floor) while I pulled it out from under her.
That, but jumping and I needed to time the pull right.
We roll around with me tickling her.
That, but I keep pretending to fall asleep only to wake up and tickle her more as she nearly escapes.
Pretending she's a burrito, by rolling her up in the towel along with a bunch of imaginary toppings and then pretending to eat it all.
Lots of one-off things, some of which she'd ask for a few times and then get bored.
After a couple weeks Lily (10y) and Anna (then 8y) said they wanted silly time too. I told them if they were completely ready for bed by their official bedtime (8:30 for a 7:15 wakeup) they could have silly time too. This has been very motivating for them: they pay attention to the time and try very hard to be ready. I wish they wouldn't cut it so tight—it's common for them to come running up to me at 8:30 on the dot asking "did I make it!?—but at this point I only very rarely end up skipping silly time because they took too long.
Initially they wanted to do the same games as Nora, but more recently they've been really into 2-on-1 wrestling. The rules:
- The teams are Lily and Anna vs Jeff
- A team get a point by holding someone's shoulders to the mat (bed) for a count to three.
- It's not enough to hold them down while they're on their back; their shoulders do need to be touching the mat.
- No hitting, kicking, or other things that make an impact.
While we're not evenly matched (they still haven't pinned me), in operating under the constraint that I need to not hurt them we're close enough that it takes a good bit of effort for me to pin them. If I just try to pin one with no strategy the other will rescue before I count to three. I really like this dynamic, because it means they're working together, and I think it's good for their relationship.
courtesy of Ajeya
Another thing I like about this game, weirdly enough, is that people do accidentally get mildly hurt sometimes. For example, last night Lily kneed herself in the nose twice. Unlike most parts of their life where they generally take time to focus on their injury and ideally blame someone, they like this game enough that they recover very quickly and we keep going. This even happens when one of them hurts the other; normally they'd probably try to convince me to intervene and punish but here they're on the same side and need each other's help. While if I thought was likely to get actually injured I would want to change what we're doing, over the last few weeks of playing this I've seen them get substantially more resilient.
Probably the biggest downside is that this isn't very restful, but they seem to be falling asleep fine, and I haven't noticed increased morning tiredness or anything.
I don't expect to continue doing this indefinitely. Maybe they'll get bored (as they already did once; we had a few weeks of pillow fights in the middle), someone will get hurt enough that this isn't fun, or Nora will want to join in and we'll need to change it a lot (the current version would be too dangerous for her). But it's fun for now!