I always struggle with writing blog posts that sound like I am giving advice because I don’t think I have parenting answers, nor do I think I am any sort of expert. I have three kids under six, and every day feels like a new adventure — like we’re just kind of winging it.
I do however do something differently; something that differs from most of the advice parenting books give and I’m here to live to tell about it.
We travel with our kids all the time and people always ask how we do it without losing our minds. There are a lot of answers to that question (one of them being that we definitely have lost our minds at times), but one thing has been consistent with all three of our kids: we are not “on a schedule.” We didn’t start out on a schedule with our first baby, and we don’t really have one now.
Even right after our first child was born, we took him on vacations and out to eat with us — he just went everywhere we went. My parents did the same with my sisters and me when we were little, so I didn’t really know a different way to be a parent. When I read some of these baby sleep schedule books during my first pregnancy and started to panic about how my life was going to change, and wondered how in the world I was going to be able to feed the baby at the right times and put him to bed at the proper hour, I started to realize that the baby sleep schedule life probably wasn’t for me.
Before you start sending me all the parenting books and personal stories that prove me wrong, read on.
I am not saying that being on a schedule is a bad thing. In fact, friends of mine who were strict about their kids’ schedules, have kids that sleep through the night way earlier than my kids ever did and take better, more regular naps than mine do. I really do think the schedule thing works. My problem with the whole sleep schedule thing is that a lot of times it didn’t work with my schedule, our family’s schedule (once we had multiple kids), or the things that we like to do. That may sound selfish, but it just isn’t what works for us. The kids go along with our schedule, and it makes us (and our kids) able to do a lot of things that we wouldn’t be able to do on a more rigid schedule.
You might be picturing us with our kids piled in our bed until midnight drinking juice, while we stay up pulling our hair out, exhausted and crazy in a schedule-less child-dominated free for all. It’s not that crazy, I promise.
We discipline our kids and are actually pretty strict, and we do try to adhere to a regular bed time on a normal night. Our kids are usually in bed by around 8:30pm, they sleep in their own beds, go to bed happily most nights, and they sleep until morning (which in my five year old’s mind is 7am, even on the weekends). So it’s not a total crazy town at our house, and we don’t let the kids do whatever they want or stay up just to stay up.
By no schedule I mean we don’t stop what we’re doing to put the kids to bed at exactly 7pm. We don’t have a set nap time, and sometimes that means they fall asleep on the way home from a Target shopping run. On the weekends, we may skip a nap for our youngest, and if she’s tired she will sleep in the car on the way home from whatever we are doing. We may go to the movies, and she might fall asleep in the middle and miss the ending. My middle child may or may not have slept in her stroller through some Mardi Gras parades when she was four months old.
When my oldest was still taking naps, he loved to fall asleep under the umbrella at the beach and snooze away. If we go out to dinner on the weekends or while on vacation, the kids might stay up until 9:30 or even 10pm. And yes, for some reason after those nights, it seems like they wake up even earlier than normal the next morning, and they may be grumpy or fussy for a day or two after those late nights.
If this all gives you anxiety, the schedule-free life might not be for you. And that’s ok.
Our schedule-free life isn’t pretty some of the time, and it certainly isn’t perfect. But we have been able to do so many fun things that a rigid schedule would have prevented us from doing and/or our kids would have been left out of enjoying them. We would have missed late night dance parties with friends and their kids, catching the 4th of July fireworks at the beach, a road trip with friends from San Francisco to Seattle, two and three hour flights to fun places, eating dinner out at restaurants regularly, building sandcastles on the beach with my older two while my youngest slept under the umbrella, and powering through all day marathons at Disney while the nappers napped in the strollers and the rest of us pressed on.
This isn’t for everyone. I do think babies and toddlers on a schedule are probably the best sleepers. I would just offer this as an alternative idea: that maybe they will still sleep if they aren’t “baby wise,” even if that means that they’re five or six months old before they are sleeping consistently through the night and they may never nap at the exact same time every day. I have seen that over time our kids have become very adaptable and tend to go with the flow because they have learned that they sort of have to. I don’t feel like I have to stop what I’m doing to get the kids to bed or go home early because they will just lose it if they don’t take a nap at their normally scheduled time.
They don’t feel like we go with their schedule; the kids know that they go with our schedule.
In this internet-driven compulsiveness to be perfect parents, the baby sleep schedule is another one of those things on the list we are supposed to check off to make sure we are doing it all right. Breastfeed until a year old — check. Have baby on a sleep, eat, awake schedule — check. Tummy time — check. Create mommy and me playgroups to have social interactions — check. We are all buying into the idea that there is some perfect formula to be a perfect parent and we have to do it all just right and follow the guidelines to succeed.
I am here as a very imperfect parent who has made it through three babies without a schedule to say: toss out the rule book and do what feels right to you and what makes you happy. If you are happy and having fun, your kids will be too. If you are laid back and go with the flow and allow your kids to do that too, they will be adaptable and able to get their life experiences from being included in your life experiences.
