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Home / Family / Parenting / Infants and Toddlers
What Time Should Be Your Childs Bedtime?
By:Hege Crowton
Is this among the thousands of questions you are asking yourself when it comes to your child? For many people this is a very important question since most of you would like to keep your child on a healthy schedule. Having a regular bedtime for your child is not only good for him/her but also very good for you as a parent.
Having a child running around the house all day can be very exhausting on a parent and it is only right that you as a parent are able to have some time to yourself after your child has gone to bed. A growing child needs a lot of sleep and there is no reason the kid should have the same bedtime as you. The evening should be your time to enjoy and recoup for the next day.
Many parents ask themselves what is a reasonable time for when their child should be in bed. When the child is no longer being bottle fed or breast fed but is eating like the rest of the family a good time for them to be in bed is somewhere around 8 o’clock. This will provide them with the 10-11 hours of sleep they need a night and they will wake up without being grumpy.
To begin with lots of parents will find it hard to get their child to bed at this time if they haven’t had this schedule before but as long as you are able to stick to it you will soon find that after a while the child will start getting tired around this time and the objection of going to bed will be less and less the longer you are able to enforce this without giving in to their protests.
How about you as a parent, would it not be wonderful to have a few hours a night all to yourself? Of course it would and by no means does this mean that you don’t love your child. You are showing a lot of love by taking charge and setting limits and rules as well as a set schedule, which every child needs. It gives them security, stability and they know what to expect and what is expected of them.
For no reason should you feel discouraged if you are not able to get your child on a set schedule within a few days because it will take some time to get them in the habit besides children are nosy little people who likes to know what is going on so naturally they are going to fight you all the way until they realize that you are in charge and this is the way it is.
Therefore, for the well being of both you and your child it may be a very good idea to start getting them on the way to a regular bed time schedule. The sooner you are able to enforce this, the less of a struggle you will have. The older they are before you start setting limits the harder of a time you will have and at times it can actually get quite ugly when it comes to “fighting” your child to prove who is in charge.
Article Source: http://www.dailynewarticles.com
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