Go To Bed, Dammit!

As a card-carrying member of the Bedtime Nazi League, I was appalled by this article about neurotic, over-indulgent parents who seem incapable of keeping little Geoffrey and Aspen in their own rooms at night:

THIS is what 3 a.m. looks like at the Costello house, a diminutive red brick three-story in the West Village: On the second floor, Harrison, age 5, is splayed, sideways and snoring, across his parents’ king-size, Anglo-Indian four-poster, having muscled his mother out completely and pushed his father, Paul, a 35-year-old photographer, to the extreme edge of the bed. Sara Ruffin Costello, the style director of Domino magazine, is upstairs in her 3-year-old daughter Carolina’s bed, which is a hammered-metal four-poster queen dressed in pink paisley sheets with a ruffle. “It is the bed I would have if I were single,” Ms. Costello, 38, said. “It is my dream bed, which is a good thing because I spend a lot of time in it.” Harrison’s bed, his fourth, a trundle model from Ikea, is empty and pristine, the least-used space in the house.

“I used to get hysterical and wonder, what is this new life of stumbling around in the middle of the night?” Ms. Costello said. “Now it’s just so oddly part of the routine. Paul and I wonder, will we ever sleep together again?”

The Costellos are not alone in not being alone in their bed. But they are also not the happy hosts of the so-called family bed that’s been inching its way into the mainstream. “It is everybody’s Achilles’ heel, I think — this rotating, and not sleeping,” Ms. Costello said. “Yet it is so gross to think you’ve ended up with a family bed.” Like a lot of parents right now, Ms. Costello is a reluctant co-sleeper, too tired to disrupt a practice that may irritate one or both adults, but, in the end, seems to promise the “most amount of sleep for the most people in the house,” as Miriam K. Schneider, the mother of 11-year-old twin daughters, said.

Ms. Schneider, a former banker who lives on the Upper East Side and is president of the Manhattan Twins Club, reported that her daughters still migrate in and out of their parents’ room, sleeping many nights on a futon next to their mother’s side of the bed. “The cat sleeps on the top bunk of their very expensive bunk beds,” Ms. Schneider said, “which I used to describe as the most expensive toy storage ever conceived.”

What in Heaven's name is wrong with these people? We're not talking about the occassional appearance of one of the kiddies owing to a thunderstorm or an upset stomach, we're talking about the norm in these families.

We found very early on (here's a free tip for ya, Jen) that the sooner we instilled in the Llama-ettes the idea of what might be called the Definitive Good-Night, the happier everybody was. Our rule was simple: 8 o'clock - go to bed. Whether you sleep or not is your own business, but we don't want to see or hear you until the morning. As a practical matter, this has slipped to about 8:30 or so (as bedtime stories get longer), but the principle still holds good.

The people in this article simply seem incapable of taking any kind of stand with their kids, apparently terrified that any assertion of parental privilege or authority will turn the little darlin's against them. There is a good bit of suggestion that this is a product of Boomer-angst: still rebelling against what they perceive as their own parents' over-restrictiveness, they've gone off the deep end in the opposite direction, with the resulting domestic train-wrecks. Tossers.

The other interesting thing about the article is the parents' knee-jerk reaction: Therapy! I sometimes think I'm in the wrong racket - if I really wanted to rake in the dubloons, I'd hire myself out as a "Consultant Therapist." I wouldn't necessarily have to specialize in anything, just work as a kind of jack-of-all-trades-in-the-bleeding-obvious. Lawdy knows the market is there.

Yips! to Joanne Jacobs.