Heather – Teenagers & Bedtime

Hi Heather,

I am not able to post from your post for some reason, but I think this is a way around that…I just wanted to share what we have done.

I know the resistance we moms feel as the children grow up. It makes the words of wisdom we have heard from the beginning, ‘they grow up all too fast’ become so real.

However, we continue to read aloud to our children as they get older, and plan to do so until they leave. It is all about continuing to instill our values into them. We have family devotions, reading aloud (and sometimes it is very short), prayer, and they then go off for their own free time/bedtime routine as we are putting the younger ones to bed. We also turn off the internet because it can be such a stumbling block for our boys, especially, when the rest of the family is in bed.

This next may not apply to your situation but as far as amount of sleep, our standard came from an odd source. I heard a highschool student reading his essay on sleep deprivation on a pbs radio show. He related a study that stated that teens need a minimum of 9 hours of sleep. My children said I was driving them too much (well, I think they said it more politely than that :)) and so I thought, ‘Aha! Nine hours!’ That is what I schedule. If my children choose to not sleep that much and are grumpy, then we make sure they abide by it by going to bed earlier, not getting up later.

Blessings,

Cindy