DR. F. FELICIA FERRARA: Hello, I'm Dr. Felicia. I am the parent coach, and I would like to share with you some points of wisdom on how to set bedtimes for your children. That's always a nightmare for every parent, especially when we have two working parents and each one wants to go to bed but the children don't. You wonder where they get their energy. They seem to get a second wind of energy by 9 o'clock when you're about ready to fizz out. Well, the truth is for smaller children, what you want to do is stay consistent with your bedtime. For instance, if you say it's 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock, make it that same time every night. Now, every child is going to give you a little bit of a heartache some time about going to bed. That's just human nature. For the smaller children and for the teenagers, you'd want to be pretty descript about it. For teenagers, the bigger problem lays in the fact that you need to perhaps take their cellphones away before they go to bed. Because usually what they're doing is under the covers they're still cell-phoning each other, so they'll stay on the phone till 2 in the morning. So to avoid all that, you want to take away all the electronic toys at that time. For all ages of children, you want to allow them maybe a half hour downtime before bed, where everything slows down. The lights are dimmed. Maybe some soft music is playing, of course, that's a hard one when you have teens. But you want to do something that's very tranquil. You certainly don't want to get into a heated family argument at that time and you don't want to get them all riled up, so you want them as calm as possible. For smaller kids, you can actually put them in a bath and you can soothe them that way. And also the old-fashioned remedy, my grandma used to use, which is warm milk and honey. It soothes the nerves. It's such a nice drink before bed. But for the teenagers, they might take their shower before they go to bed at night and that would cool them down. If you have a particular child that's extremely active and if it's a male for instance, you might have a gym set for them to go work out on. A lot of kids have a punching bag that they get a lot of frustrations out. During the teen years, it's not unusual to have explosive anger out, especially male children but the females can be pretty moody too. So when that mood comes up, you should have a special signal. Like for instance, you might make a time-out like this. Or you might just go a signal like no, no, no, no. And that's enough to let them know that they better stop right now. Now for you as a parent, you're going to try all of these little tricks. You're going to try the warm baths or hot showers. You're going to have warm milk and honey, and you're also going to have lower lights and quietness in the house. That's the best way to get your children to sleep early, and I wish you good luck and happy sleeping, happy dreams.
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