The 7 O'Clock Bedtime: Early to Bed, Early to Rise, Makes a Child Healthy, Playful, and Wise

by Inda Schaenen

Book Overview

Are children hardwired to stay up late, scarfing down cookies and soda and surfing the Internet? No, says Inda Schaenen, who advocates a no-nonsense, nurturing approach that will help you get your kids into bed by 7 o'clock -- and help you make a saner life for yourself. Most kids today are overscheduled, and consequently they're often wound up and active until late in the evening. But when kids are exhausted, bedtime becomes a struggle and everyone...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060988894
• ISBN13: 9780060988890
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A must read book

I love this book and recommend it to everyone I meet. Are my kids in bed by 7:00 PM? No. We homeschool and have no reason to be up early for school every morning by 6:30 -7:00 so we moved everything back an hour. it works much better for our family while still giving us an early bedtime and enough sleep. I look around me and am saddend by all the over tired children I see, thier angry exhausted short tempered paretns who are keeping them up in the name o quality family time. My chidlrens behaviors changed dramatically when I instituted an early bed time. htier morning wake time did not change. We don't get all legalistic about keeping her rules but the closer we stick to them and the more routiened our days are the better bed time and sleep are for my children. Having the early bedtime also has reeduced thier night walking!! what a bonus.

Great advice for children with night terrors

I am not completely finished with this book yet. But, I do agree with the authors premise of the 7 o'clock bedtime. I have a child who has regular night terrors. These most often occur when he is overtired. Before I even read this book I had charted my son's daily schedule and found that if he was in bed and sleeping by 7:30pm his night terrors were greatly decreased. I had also found that early dinner and no t.v. before bed made the evening so much easier in getting ready for bed. Don't judge this book before you read the majority of it. There is always exceptions to the rule and some late nights, but I think she has a very logical solution for some of our children's sleep and behavioral problems. FYI...I am a stay at home mother, thank God, so I can follow a schedule like this.

Excellent Ideas

This book has a wealth of common sense and good ideas. It includes many practical ways to implement an early bedtime and a harmonious family lifestyle. Many families, however, would find her idea of the 8 o'clock bedtime better suited to modern life, simply adjusting the whole schedule an hour later. This is a necessity for us, since Dad does not get home until 6:00, and a family dinner is important to us. At five years old, my son needs about 10-1/2 hours of sleep, and does best with 11 hours. It makes sense that a child will wake up naturally when he/she has had enough sleep, so the author's basic premise is, if you have to wake your child up every school day, he/she is not getting enough sleep. Most people can agree thus far, but are unwilling to admit that means the child NEEDS to get to bed earlier, just as much as he/she would NEED more food or water if hungry or thirsty! Implementing earlier bed times is the hardest thing in the world (try 10 minutes earlier per day, or even per week), but worth it. We don't watch TV anyway, but we do music practice and have to have some father-son playtime. My son has just started kindergarten and has to wake up earlier than he used to, so we are working on achieving the 8:00 bedtime on most nights. On nights when sleep-time is delayed to 8:30 or 9:00, I let my son sleep in until 7:30, and give him breakfast in the car on the way to school. Each week the earlier time becomes easier as WE PARENTS get used to it! Many thanks to the author for the voice of reason in this book!! Even if the idea seems extreme, it is a needed correction to the craziness of sleep-deprivation. This book will do much in favor of healthy, happy kids.

Sensible Advice

I have a personal library of parent/children help books with over 100 different titles and categories. Adding this book to my collection created a new section in my collection.The idea of 7'o clock bedtime may be unrealistic to working parents or stay-at-home parents, but Schaenen offers many alternative schedules for various lifestyles. But her basic tennent of the importance of sleep in a child's life should not be overlooked. Many children in our neighborhood are up past 10 pm on a school night watching television and their parents wonder why they are so wired. Too much stimulation counters the natural rythyms of a child's brain. After reading this book, we instituted an 8'oclock bedtime for our 2 1/2 year old, cancelled TV completely, and have exprienced more personal time together than ever before. We decided 8 'oclock because our child wakes always at 8 am, so 12 hours is sufficient for his age group. This book should be a "wake up" call to many parents who seem to have lost the upperhand on children and schedules. It really can change face of your family.Thanks Inda!

Loved this book!

Ever since I read this book I have found myself recommending it to all my friends. Those friends who I have lent my copy to read have since gone out and bought their own. I liked the principle enourmously and her gentle approach to it. I found the book to written differently than most parenting books with their air of authority and lofty advice. This book gets down to the nitty gritty. The style of writing was more like an old friend writing a letter to you, sharing what worked for her. Sometimes the writing would wander off the subject a bit, but it was that personal aspect that appealed to me when I read it.Ah ha! But what was it about you may ask. It is about how to get kids into bed by 7 o'clock (you probably geussed this much already) and explores the practical way of scheduling the early evening to accomplish this. It also covers the benefits of the early bedtime and tailoring the schedule to fit different situations, i.e. vacations and sleep overs. The people who will most benefit from this book are people with school age children or children who have to be somewhere at a certain time in the morning. However, I have a toddler and I have started slowly implenting the earlier bedtime with a view of 'starting as we mean to go on'. As an attachment parent, I liked her references to nursing and as part of a tv free family I especially liked her views that tv is overstimulating. I would put this book in with my top ten parenting books.