5 Ways to Handle Bedtime Battles Without Dividing Your Parenting Team - Weekend Wisdom

My husband and I are struggling over bedtime issues with our adopted child.

Bedtime has become long and drawn out.

It is emotional and exhausting.

Our child gets dysregulated quite easily, fights sleep and often needs a lot of reassurance and connection at night.

I feel like I'm carrying almost all of it alone because my partner either disappears says they don't know what to do, or thinks I'm overcomplicating things by using trauma-informed parenting strategies.

He just wants our child to learn how to go to bed, stay in bed, and fall asleep on their own until morning.

I'm starting to feel resentful and overwhelmed.

We barely have time together as a couple anymore, and honestly, I don't even have time to take care of myself.

I know my partner loves our child, but it still feels very uneven and I don't know how to ask for more without starting another argument.

How do we get on the same page about bedtime and share the load better? So listener, first I want to say you are not alone in this struggle.

Bedtime challenges are so common in adoptive, foster, and kinship families, especially when parents are raising kids who have experienced trauma, loss, unpredictability, and disrupted attachment.

So the challenge of one parent carrying a greater share of the bedtime routine is quite common.

The complication comes when bedtime and not being on the same page with parenting converge with your exhaustion and your frustration over the complications that are going on in your home.

For many of our kids from hard places, bedtime can feel particularly vulnerable.

Their hard stuff may have kind of been kept at bay all day long.

But the quiet and the dark of night can bring up a lot of anxiety for our kids.

Separation can feel really scary.

Transitions can feel dysregulating.

Bad memories from other things that happened in the dark in other placements can happen.

So what might look like stalling or defiance is often our child's nervous system saying, I don't feel safe yet.

So when one caregiver ends up carrying most of that emotional load, burnout can happen faster.

And I think what you're describing is a little bit of burnout for both you and your partner.

One thing that I appreciated from a previous conversation that I had with Dr. Josh Davis was the reminder that most couples are not alone in fighting over bedtime and that they're not actually fighting about bedtime, right? They're fighting about feeling alone.

They're fighting about feeling unseen or criticized or exhausted or overwhelmed with what they are carrying.

And it's important to note that because that can change the goal from how do I force my partner to do bedtime my way to how do we become teammates again, even over this issue of bedtime.