How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  What’s “enough”? The number of hours needed does vary, but not nearly as much as we think. Most people who say they do fine on five or six hours are kidding themselves. Seven is the happy medium for adults and the sweet spot where many can function at their best, which includes being a successful part of your family. I need eight at a minimum, and I guarantee you’ll like me better if I’m getting that eight hours consistently, not just on the occasional lucky weekend.

  Children and teenagers need even more sleep than we do: eleven to thirteen hours for toddlers and preschoolers; ten hours for younger school-age children; nine to ten for teenagers. Those hours make a difference in grades, health, behavior, and general quality of life. More sleep means happier parents, children, and teens, and happier people work better together to have happier, and thus more manageable, mornings.

  Even with all of that research pointing us toward counting backward from the number on our alarm clock and turning off the lights on time, most of us have trouble doing it. Relatively few adults, teenagers, or children get the sleep they need. How can we make that change?

  Sell Your Kids on More Sleep

  If bedtimes for your children have slipped, take a hard look at how much sleep they’re able to get after lights out. Upping that number probably means you’re going to have to put in some tougher bedtimes for a few weeks while you establish or reestablish an earlier routine. It’s hard to start dinner earlier, run the tub earlier, or cut short your family evening (especially if you or your partner often work late), but the morning benefits will quickly convince you that it’s worth it, and the long-term benefits are even greater.

  You can help make the shift by changing the way you talk to your children about sleep and bedtime. Researchers have worked with preschoolers and seventh graders and found that, in both groups, learning the value of sleep led to children getting more. Both groups were given positive sleep education about the benefits of sleep in age-appropriate ways. Parents often get caught up in describing bedtime as a “have to,” as in “You have to go to bed now.” For little kids, sleep demands that they trade in a bright world of fun and company for a dark and lonely room (or at least, that’s how many see it) while older kids share the problems we adults have. At night, finally done with their homework, they’re doing their own thing. Bedtime just means morning and the school routine come sooner.

  Researchers created a program for preschoolers that included teaching children how to put a teddy bear to sleep using a routine, followed by simple lessons on the importance of sleep and routine for people, too. They were taught that more sleep helped them be cheerful and get along with others, and given a bedtime chart and stickers to use to follow their own routine. The program, designed for low-income families, also included parent and teacher education on sleep. A month later, the children were averaging half an hour more sleep a night, even though their parents appeared to retain very little of their own sleep education.

  For seventh graders, the same researchers designed a program that taught children about the ways sleep, or a lack thereof, could affect their grades, mood, health, and relationships. They offered lessons on basic sleep hygiene, including a bedtime ritual, consistency in waking and sleeping times, a dark room, and avoiding caffeine late in the day. Those students maintained better sleep times and sleep quality for nearly a year before reverting to earlier habits.

  What these studies show us, as parents, is that how we talk about sleep and how much our kids understand the need for it is important. We can establish and maintain our own sleep routines and talk about how we give up evening hours in exchange for better mornings. And when we observe the impact of a lack of sleep in ourselves or our kids, we can note it, along with a plan to do better. Kids can see how differently they feel after a full night’s sleep, and although it’s not likely to make them hop into bed without the usual foot-dragging, it does make a difference.

  With teenagers especially, parents tend to be too tolerant of activities that interfere with sleep but seem to help children reach other goals, like studying or sports practices. That’s shortsighted. Instead of looking the other way when our kids stay up late cramming for a test or a play rehearsal runs late into a school night, we should remind children that more sleep means better academic performance and help them spread out their studying over a longer stretch of time—even if it means we’re paying attention to details we’d usually leave to them. When it comes to other activities that bleed into sleep time, take action. If your child is young enough, step in and don’t send her to an activity that will go too late, and remind a coach or instructor that nine hours of sleep at night plus a seven a.m. bus equals a nine p.m. bedtime. Even if you end up compromising once in a while, teaching your child that you take sleep seriously sets them up to better manage their own sleep.

  Get More Sleep Yourself

  To really feel happier in the mornings, parents need to get more sleep, too. We’re better at everything when we’ve had more sleep, and most importantly for better mornings, we’ve got more patience and more ability to give our children the help and support they need to get going. Too little sleep, and we’re jumpy and reactive. Our brains are more likely to flood us with adrenaline in a stress response to what really isn’t a life-or-death situation, and that makes it really difficult not to blow up at the kid who got the waffle stuck in the toaster. (There’s more on this in Chapter 7, “Discipline: This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You.”) But we’re parents, and that means we can’t always sleep when we want to, even if it would be better for everyone.

  There’s no denying that infants make getting enough sleep impossible. Not nearly impossible, or practically impossible, but actually impossible. A survey of one thousand new parents by a British bed manufacturer found that two-thirds were sleeping only four contiguous hours or less. Five hours of sleep at night (still not nearly enough) during the first two years of parenting would be 3,650 hours; four hours a night is 2,920. That leaves new parents with a sleep deficit of 730 hours—or the amount of sleep you’d need, at five hours a night, for about five months. Looking to get a healthy seven hours? As a new parent, after two years, you’re more than a year behind.

  You can do three things during this phase of life. You can allow enough time for sleep, putting yourself to bed early enough that if the baby was to sleep, you’d get what you needed. You almost certainly won’t, but many of us shoot ourselves in the foot by not even setting up the opportunity to accumulate those hours. Work with your partner, if you have one, to create trade-offs. Even if one of you is working and the other isn’t, you both need an equal shot at sleep. Next, create the best possible opportunity for sleeping when the baby allows. Shawn Stevenson, author of Sleep Smarter, says that when you can’t get quantity sleep, the sleep you get should be as high-quality as possible. His suggestions include giving yourself a caffeine curfew, timing your exercise for morning hours, and avoiding the second-wind syndrome at bedtime. Let yourself go to sleep when you need to.

  Finally, go easier on yourself (and on your partner) when it’s impossible to get the sleep you need, whether it’s baby or kid sleep troubles or your own insomnia that’s keeping you up. Let some things go, in your mood, in your home, and in what you expect of yourself. You’re running uphill and that makes a difference in everything you do.

  Once you’re out of the baby years, set an example for your children by making sleep a priority for yourself. Create a bedtime, stick with it, and talk about it. Set a curfew for digital devices, even those in nighttime mode. It’s not just the light that’s stimulating, it’s the constant input from tech and television that keeps our brains firing long after we’ve shut our eyes. If you’re in the habit of staying up late for pleasure or productivity, it will probably feel difficult to shut down sooner. What you want now isn’t always what you want later. Your tomorrow morning self will thank you for the gift of more sleep.

  Changing My Morning Story

 
Even beyond working toward better sleep, there’s a lot left to improve about the average morning. Setting out to make mornings happier at our house was daunting and packed with failure. Take, for example, my attempt to adopt Gretchen Rubin’s “sing in the mornings” resolution from her book The Happiness Project. Rubin’s daughter Eliza was asked at school to describe how her parents woke her up in the morning. “With a good-morning song,” she said.

  Now, lest you misjudge Rubin, this was apparently not at all accurate. “I’d only done that a few times in her whole life,” she said. But after Eliza described it in school, Rubin thought it must have made a real impression on her daughter. She vowed to make a habit of it, and succeeded. In her world, “singing in the morning really had a cheering effect.”

  It didn’t in mine. Singing seemed like going too far, so I thought a morning mix of get-moving tunes might be the way to go. I created a Happy Morning playlist for the kitchen and tried, for weeks, to let those cheerful songs set our morning mood.

  I hated it. I do not want to be nudged out of my morning fog by ABBA; I am not a morning dancing queen. But the real problem with my attempt to drown out my morning grumpies with a rousing version of “Everything Is Awesome” wasn’t that I didn’t like the music. It was that I was still fundamentally misunderstanding mornings. I thought I hated them, and I do. But I kind of love them, too. And it took a bigger failure to figure that out.

  Paying someone else to do the things you hate to do to free yourself up for what’s important is a classic strategy, beloved by the “highly successful” and the “get it done” crowd. About the same time as I attempted to institute musical mornings, our sister-team of house cleaners moved, leaving us bereft. And since I’d long admired the household of friends, both doctors and the parents of five children ranging in age from two to twelve, I asked them how they did it. They had a housekeeper, an “Alice,” and she did mornings.

  So instead of replacing the cleaning team, I hired one person, Betty, for the same amount of money. Betty, a naturally early riser, was not just willing but enthusiastic about arriving at our house at six a.m. and helping us get our day started, three days a week, before putting in a few hours of cleaning and heading home to her husband and hobbies. Even as I write about it, it sounds brilliant. Not a morning person? Hire a morning person! I could have an extra hour of sleep under my belt right now.

  It was not brilliant. Not for me. To this day, hiring Betty stands out as the moment when I realized that what I thought I wanted was not what I wanted at all. I thought I wanted easier mornings for me. What I really wanted were happier—and easier—mornings for all of us.

  A lot happens in the morning. Plans and lunches are made and discussed. Homework is gathered. Tests quickly reviewed for. Clothing is found to be too short or too full of holes. There were many pies being made in the morning, and before Betty’s arrival, my husband and I had our fingers in all of them. The advent of Betty meant losing a connection to our children’s day that I hadn’t realized how much I relied on. Instead of outsourcing so I could focus on the important things, I’d outsourced something that was itself important. Pretty soon we started joining back in, and there were too many cooks in the breakfast kitchen. In a matter of months, Betty moved on.

  What was true for us in the mornings turned out to be true about a lot of things to do with the daily work of raising our family. I didn’t want to not do it. I just wanted it to be more fun, or at the very least less miserable. We regrouped after Betty. I knew what I didn’t want in the morning. I didn’t want to be late. Didn’t want to feel rushed. Didn’t want to spend it yelling. But when I focused on the didn’ts, things didn’t get much better. I quickly found myself once again sending a child off to school with a parting shout of “See, I told you you’d be late,” a slammed door, and a screech of angry tires. Wow, I thought, as I churned off, fuming. This is a really lousy way to start the day.

  That was when I finally figured out what I did want. I wanted to give the kids—and myself—a good start. I wanted to be there in the morning. I wanted to be a part of that part of their day. And if I wanted to be there, then it had to be possible to turn mornings around.

  Fortunately, a good start, in my mind, doesn’t require quinoa crepes or the family sitting down around the table together. If you can do that, you can probably move on to another chapter, because you’ve got mornings licked. A good start looked simple to me: it looked like a morning where children knew what they needed to do, had enough time to do it, and weren’t being yelled at every step of the way, even if things were going wrong. Even if they were going to be late. A good start looked like a morning where everyone worked together toward a common goal: getting the car out of the garage early enough to get to school not smack on at the starting bell, early enough that they could settle into their day. Once I knew what I wanted, it was easier to start figuring out how to get there. Here’s some of what I did, and what other families suggest, for turning your mornings around.

  Making Mornings Better

  GET UP EARLIER

  Many, many ideas for improving the morning involve rising earlier. In her book I Know How She Does It, Laura Vanderkam analyzed 1,001 days in the lives of working mothers earning at least $100,000 a year. Many found more time to spend with young children, who naturally get up early, by embracing that early morning time instead of trying to keep the children up after dinner to play with parents who didn’t make it home until seven or eight. Other parents swear by getting up early enough to have a cup of coffee before the rest of the household appears, or to work on a personal project, read, or exercise. They have sex or balance their checkbooks. Like the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, they believe six impossible things before breakfast.

  Although I’ve finally managed to do this (I get up half an hour earlier to run a mile on a treadmill five days a week), I still resent the people to whom this comes easily. If you’re one of them, and if you can help your children to get up early enough not to feel rushed in the morning, you can probably change the tenor of your mornings more easily than those of us who wake up grumpy and never, no matter how much sleep we’ve had, want to get out of bed. Mornings at your house will probably be more pleasant than many. But even for families of early risers, it’s still hard to get out the door.

  GET UP DIFFERENTLY

  Until very recently, I never thought I was capable of getting up a minute before I had to. Instead, I focused my attention on getting up differently, and helping the children get up differently as well. For many years, my husband started the morning at our house, and going up the stairs to shake the children out of their sleep was his least favorite moment of the morning (and theirs). Our heaviest sleepers were, at the time, in the two top bunks, meaning that on many mornings, he was making his way up to the top to shake a child awake. That made him irritated, and it irritated the sleeper as well, setting off a chain reaction that more than once ended in a morning temper tantrum.

  That is definitively not a good start to the day. The solution seems obvious—alarm clocks—and after some trial and error, and one child who kept setting her alarm for the wee hours by mistake, this helped a lot. The natural anger anyone feels at an alarm clock was directed at the clock, not Dad. There’s still a fair amount of checking to be done that they actually get up, but the onus is on them, not on us.

  You can also wake the kids up differently by staggering their schedules. Naomi Hattaway, a mother of three in Virginia, found that when her kids woke up at the same time, everyone was stumbling over each other and getting in each other’s way. So instead, she encourages her youngest (her “morning child”) to get up first. “She gets time to adjust, wake up, greet the day, have one-on-one time with parents before her older siblings get up.” As children get older, the same system minimizes the rush on the bathroom.

  ENLIST KIDS TO HELP

  Because there’s so much at stake in the mornings—and
yet, on a global scale, so little—mornings are the perfect time to let your children take responsibility for themselves. Depending on their age, they can, and should, be the ones charged with remembering their hats and mittens, sneakers, backpacks. They can make their own breakfasts, set their own alarms, help with siblings.

  But what if they fail? Hit snooze and roll over, arrive at school without a coat in a New England January, leave the homework they worked so hard on in the middle of the kitchen table? Within the constraints of what works for you and your family, making those little failures their problem and not yours will go a long way to making your mornings happier in the long run. Parents who say they’re happier in the mornings put kids in charge of the things the kids can handle, and let their children’s responsibilities grow with the kids.

  “One day our youngest (a first grader at the time) told us he knew it was time to get up for school because he could hear us screaming at his older brother,” says Angela Crawford, a mother of three in New Jersey. “That was our aha moment—something had to change. Every morning we were constantly battling to get him to do what he needed to do: print out his homework, pack his backpack.”

  So, she says, they set rules for who did what and when. “Children pack their own backpacks, and we won’t bring them forgotten homework. I pack lunches in elementary school; once you hit middle school, you do your own. I once received an email from a teacher that my child had forgotten their homework and they asked if I would drop it off and I told them no and explained why. For two of my children getting a zero was punishment enough, for my oldest not so much, so if he missed a homework he would not be able to play with friends after school that day. We ask them (and remind them) to plan ahead and be considerate of us as well, and to ask for things like permissions slips or a ride home from sports practices before they’re walking out the door, but we don’t look for those things. If they don’t ask, it doesn’t happen.”