In Defense of Bedtime Abolition

A and K go to bed at... 9:30 PM, if we're lucky. Usually they're up until 10:30. A lot of times, A will ask to go to the open-past-midnight coffee shop, and then their bedtime slides to 12:30 AM. Sometimes even later.

People treat us like we're crazy for this. (People treat us like we're crazy for a lot of things.) I also get tired of this schedule pretty often. I need at least a couple hours to myself every night, or else I burn out really badly. This routine means I'm regularly up till at least midnight, and sometimes - especially on the later nights -that wears on me too.

It wouldn't be that hard to set and enforce a 7 PM bedtime. We could "be the parents" and make it happen if we really wanted to. But we don't. As silly as it might sound, today, I want to talk about why I hate bedtime.

Bedtime as Labor Alienation

I'll cut to the chase. I think bedtime is probably the earliest introduction to labor alienation for children. In the US, it starts at around 4-6 months with the pressure to sleep train.

Some backstory: super-fresh babies often need to be woken up every 2-3 hours to feed until they gain back to their birth weight, and even once they start sleeping in longer chunks, they still take a while to develop a solid circadian rhythm. Throughout the newborn phase, it's still expected that they'll wake up at least 1-2 times throughout the night, every night. Sleep training comes after that - it's the process of "teaching" them to sleep through the night uninterrupted. Or at least without interrupting their parents' sleep.

The Family and Medical Leave Act, which many parents rely on for parental leave, allows employees to take 12 weeks unpaid leave each year. Paid parental policies generally run out at that point too. So the push to sleep train coincides pretty perfectly with the period parents are expected to be transitioning back into full-time work.

This is generally where bedtime starts for kids in the US. Parents need to be able to sleep through the night relatively reliably in order to make it to (and through) their 9-6 shift. That means that kids have to shift their sleep schedules to accommodate them, even at this very early age.

As kids approach school age, maintaining their sleep schedules becomes ever more important - they now have their own shifts to make it through. In an increasingly stratified society, kids are under more and more pressure to become competitive in college admissions. That often means doing a lot of tutoring and other impressive-looking activities outside of school, on top of managing all their homework assignments (a substantial workload in itself). So it's not enough to just get enough sleep, it also has to be timed correctly to accommodate an increasingly structured academic and extracurricular schedule.

This is what I mean by bedtime as labor alienation. Instead of sleeping whenever/however long feels right to them, children are forced to change their sleeping habits to account for not only their parents' externally imposed labor schedules, but their own. By the time they're integrated into full time wage labor, they're used to imposing all kinds of outside imperatives on when and how they sleep.

On Circadian Rhythms

A common argument in favor of bedtimes: in a world where artificial light constantly disrupts the circadian rhythms humans have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, it becomes necessary to teach children how to sleep correctly until they can manage to do it on their own.

First of all, I don't generally subscribe to the idea that whatever our ancestors were doing 200,000 years ago is the best thing for us to do right now. The wonder of modern technology means that we can access an incomprehensible amount of knowledge on a palm-sized device at 2 AM if we choose to. Sure, Ötzi the Iceman probably got sleepy right after the sun dipped below the Alps. Why does that mean I have to drag A upstairs hours before they're ready to go to bed?

Anyway, more importantly, there isn't just one "correct" circadian rhythm. There's a huge amount of variation, and people's endogenous circadian rhythms are even influenced by genetics. My own circadian rhythm switched to a 2 AM - 10 AM sleep cycle when I was a teenager and it never really went back. I've tried for months at a time to become a morning person for the sake of productivity (and of making it to work on time), but all it did was make me feel really strung-out all the time. It's not a surprise to me that my kids like staying up late, too.

There's also a significant amount of variation in sleep habits throughout cultures and time. Even in pre-industrial societies throughout Europe and Asia (before artificial light was ubiquitous), biphasic/segmented sleep schedules were pretty common. Rituals like Spanish siestas and Japanese inemuri are well-known even outside of their cultures of origin.

All in all, the "circadian rhythm" argument for imposing bedtimes doesn't really make sense to me. If circadian rhythms were really dictating bedtimes, then they would encompass a much wider variety of sleep schedules. I think for most people, work schedules play a much bigger role in dictating sleep cycles than their natural rhythms do.

So... you're bedtime abolitionists?

Kind of, I guess? It's simply easier for us to let the kids tire themselves out at night instead of forcing a routine on them that feels unnatural. But we still do have to enforce it sometimes, just to - you know - survive. I think any society probably needs to encourage some level of bedtime enforcement to enable the delegation of labor, but I think it's unusually strict under capitalism, and not even for a good reason.

How are bedtimes enforced in the first place? By preventing the kids from leaving their rooms. That can be explicit (locking them in) or implicit (yelling at them or cajoling them until they stop trying to leave). I think either option is pretty fucked up! The only other option is to stay in the room with them until they fall asleep, which is way, way easier and time-efficient for us to do at 10 PM than 7 PM.

At 1.5 years old, K is really good about realizing when they're tired at night. They'll start getting really fussy, and then it only takes a gentle reminder ("Are you getting sleepy?") until they go "Oh yeah, good night!" and hustle themselves up the stairs. A also used to do that at that age, but now at 4 years old, they're much more resistant to being told what to do even (especially) when they're exhausted. So we still have to enforce bedtime for them, somewhat, around 10 PM.

But there's plenty of exceptions. Sometimes A stays on the couch for all-night movie marathons, which they get very excited for. And like I mentioned, A loves going to the coffee shop in the middle of the night. We go a few times a month - either my partner or I go with them for some quality one-on-one time. It's a really special ritual. A walks in, climbs up onto one of the bar stools, and goes: "I want a brownie and a hot chocolate, no whipped cream, please and thank you." Once they're finished with their snacks, they go to the back and play pinball until they run out of quarters. They're the youngest regular at the coffee shop (or I think they are, anyway), and they've made friends with several of the baristas. On one visit after their fourth birthday, the owner of the shop came over to gift them a dinosaur plushie, because he remembered from an earlier visit that they like dinosaurs.

So in being pretty lax about bedtime, we're helping the kids build their own internal sense of when they're tired. We're giving A special memories that they'll hopefully cherish as they grow older. But more than that, we're helping A become more integrated into their community from a young age: learning how to navigate their neighborhood, learning how to interact with others in public places, and building their sense of belonging.

Sure, it means I'm tired sometimes. I'm tired right now! But I'm lucky to have enough flexibility in my schedule right now to do this for them. I care much more about fostering connection with them during these formative years than I do about holding them to an artificial standard for when they "should" be sleeping - especially for the benefit of a future employer. I think that's a sacrifice worth making ten times over.