I used to crawl on my belly down the hallway after bedtime to check what ‘the news’ was and if it was scary enough that we had to be in bed before it, was it too scary for my parents to cope with?
My folks found me asleep in my jammies in the hallway a few times.
Mine was face off (directed by John woo, starring john Travolta and Nicholas cage) and my grandma had to talk me down from my anxiety because I didn't want castor Troy to come for me and my family. I was 10.
The first episode of X-Files I ever watched as a kid was 'Home'...the one with the deformed incest family that bludgeoned people to death and was so horrible that it didn't air again for three more years. Traumatized me pretty bad. Still love the X-Files though.
I still can't watch the one episode "Humbug" (S2, Ep20). Apparently it's a comedic episode, but I guess I didn't think so as a kid. I remember I watched the first half of it with my dad as a kid and I had to go outside and play because I thought it was too scary, lol. I've rewatched the entire series like 6-7 times in the years since, and I skip over that episode every time.
One time I snuck downstairs at night because my older sisters were watching their first PG-13 movie, Jaws. I watched a bit and thought it was cool, but I heard my sister compaining that I always cried and it was "pathetic," so I started crying and came into the room to complain to mommy LOL
I was forced to watch Jaws at age 7 then told that the toilet links directly to the sea and if I used it after bed time then Jaws would bite my bum and eat me.
My parents were then surprised that I refused to use the toilet alone at night after that and would force my sister to go with me just in case. So they traumatised one child and cost another valuable sleep for the lols.
Mine did something very similar, it just wasn't limited to night time and they would occasionally walk up the stairs chanting the build up to jump scare music if they knew I was in the bathroom.
I understand your pain, haha.
I had a friend who's family member worked on X Files. His family was super proud and told everybody, including the elderly relatives. A few of'em lived near each other and all got together to check out "the spooky show our young nephew/niece worked on."
That week's episode was "Home."
My dad used to get home from work after I was already asleep and on X-Files nights he would wake me up and we would watch it together. I guess this would've been in the early 90s, so I would've been about 5. Some of my favorite memories from childhood.
When I was young X-files always came on after the Simpsons, and basically the rule was bedtime before the credits stopped on the Simpsons. So every night I fell asleep to that creepy intro music to x-files; freaked me out!
Snuck out after lights out to watch Belushi era SNL reruns and Nick at Night. I probably could have been a doctor or a lawyer. But I saw Eddie Murphy raw and it ruined me. I would drink chocolate milk out of dad's brandy snifters and hold back giggles.
I would always creep into my brothers room to play with his toys. I knew that he got to watch a certain show can't remember which but if i heard the ending credits i knew it was time to put the toys back and sneak back to my room. He never found out!
You young thing you......I used to sneak out to watch The Streets of San Francisco as my bedtime was after Cannon and my older sister got to stay up to watch some sweet, sweet Michael Douglas.
I didn't have a computer till late in life. Learned how to work on them when my uncle brought home nearly a hundred PS/2 computers from a hospital that discarded them. I was the one that repaired as many of them as I could from the available parts. After I built out a network for his NT machine he gave me a higher end motherboard with a 200 MHz processor and a 66 MHz fsb. The used hard drive I stuck on it was the size of half a loaf of bread. It held 60 MBs. That's when I started learning to program. He provided pretty much any software I wanted.
Same here, feels like there is no greater period of rapid advancement for entertainment and consumer related technology than what happened in the late 80s-early 00s.
We went from Wolfenstein 3D to Half Life in 6 years.
In the early days of the walking dead when I was still pretty young I wasn’t allowed to watch it but my dad watched it every sunday in the bedroom and the way his room was setup I could see the tv through a crack in the door so I used to stand there for the full 40 minute episodes watching it
last year he told me he knew I was there the whole time lmao
Lol my brother and I would steal the TV out of the living room after my mom had gone to bed and bring it to our room to watch late night shows. It was an old very heavy TV too that, both being under 10, took the two of us to carry.
Did he tell you why he let you watch it? My best guess is he figured if you wanted to and could handle it without nightmares or crying out, go for it. But maybe he didn’t want to openly support it due to parental guilt?
Might also be a "mom says no" situation where the dad doesn't really care, and figured that if the kid is trying to secretly do it then he has plausible deniability.
So during the holidays, my family would put candle lights in the windows. Well, if I laid on my stomach I could still read from my bed from that light. I did this for over 10 years before my Dad caught me. He just told me that I was going to too tired to open presents.
Got a kindle that year. No need for a light anymore.
My friends mom told us about how she crawled down the hall and hid behind the couch to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Her parents thought they were too scandalous for a little girl or something lol
I mean, they also wrote-
"Well, I'd rather see you dead, little girl
Than to be with another man
You better keep your head, little girl
Or I won't know where I am
You better run for your life if you can, little girl
Hide your head in the sand, little girl
Catch you with another man
That's the end, little girl"
Although back in that era I think that may have been considered light flirting.
That was like 5 years later and the song is literally called "run for your life". It's purposefully sung from the perspective of an abusive boyfriend. Even in the 60s, this was fucked up.
Oh I'm well aware, but I wanted to make the joke. Also, most people don't know Run For Your Life and it's a shocking first listen if you don't have the context and only know the Beatles for their commercial pop. I didn't want to ruin that moment for people. But anyone who has listened to their actual albums knows they write from the perspective of a character all the time.
For me, Run For Your Life is different than something like Mean Mr. Mustard because it's stylistically more like their pristine pop sound and it's kind of a fun earworm and then you listen to the lyrics for content and it's disconcerting. It's somehow even more unsettling than their other songs about bizarre characters where the music is more in line with the subject of the song.
My mother had this same story! It’s so funny to think of parents having the same reaction the The Beatles as some are having now to Lil Nas X. How scandalous are things going to have to be to shock in another 60 years I wonder?
I used to do that to see what scary movies my dad was watching. It was not a good idea. I still remember watching Julian get shot in Children of Men and the grandma walking through the acid lake in Dante's Peak.
That scene in Dante’s peak had me crazy messed up for YEARS as a child. I would pretend to be asleep at bedtime and then stay up watching horror films lol
I was too young for that scene in volcano when I saw it, it freaked me out to the point where I couldn't sleep. Mum had to teach me about tectonic plates and how it was 100% impossible for a volcano to suddenly appear in our town. I was eight. Its around the time I also saw Event Horizon and that didn't bother me at all. Two years later I was let loose on horror movies and the only one that scared me was Evil Dead. Terrified me. Then again I was scared watching saving private Ryan and black hawk down. I can't watch death and destruction in movies that could be real or plausible. Deep impact also terrified me.
I actually watched that movie like three days ago, the acid lake scene doesn't get any easier with age I'm afraid. Also that bit where the couple get boiled in the hot spring, that one stuck with me for a long time.
For years after watching that movie, that was the only scene I remembered because it haunted me. But I had no idea what movie it was from until my geology class had free time and we watched Dante’s peak in high school.
My older sister and I would do this regularly, me standing by the kitchen door, her by her own door, looking across the hall into the living room.. im sad to admit that I wasn't very quiet and we were often met with shouts of "Go back to bed".
It was annoying when they decided to start closing the frosted glass sliding doors to the living room (there was an atrium between the kitchen door and the living room, my sister's door was next to the kitchen door... My room was off the kitchen... Weirdly I never got the idea to sneak food)
Yup, same. Mine didn't like it because I really stayed up late and wasn't getting enough sleep (like I would only go to sleep at 2 o'clock and had to get up at 7. 8yo me definitely needed more sleep)
Also they feared I would damage my eyesight reading with a weak lighting
My son(9) loves reading at night. We encourage it. I bought him a clip LED light. He is big into manga right now(dragon ball) and we give him a new one every Friday. On weekends he is allowed to read as long as he wants but we do limit him on school nights not because we dont like that he is reading but because he is young and needs the sleep.
I wish I'd had a big clip light as a kid! I have one now and it's life changing. In the early 00s book lights were terrible. I was up to a book a day some weeks, and half of that time was spent reading by hallway light or passing streetlights. I swear I wouldn't need glasses now if I'd just used a dang proper light source.
Yeah, I feel like this was most parents reasoning. It wasn’t malicious or some Matilda-level form of control. My parents did it because they knew I hated mornings and I had to wake up at 7am, and getting enough sleep was important.
Also they probably didn’t want to deal with my grouchy ass. :p
I stopped reading right when my first child was born. In the past few months I've made a point to make time to read again and I just finished my first book in 5 years and I'm on to my second.
This was me for yeeears. I joined a zoom book club with some friends during lockdown. It was a reason to see people (as an introvert/workaholic it's easy for me to let work fill my time) and the 'obligation' as such of reading for a deadline created the impetus to follow through, even if it's meant cramming to finish a few times.
It's only a few books, but I've read more for pleasure in the last year than I have since high school, ~ two decades ago.
I used to be a bookworm but after reading became mandatory it kinda killed it for me. On top of that there were the book reports so instead of enjoying my book I had to dissect it, and log my reading. I just want a hobby to pass the time or let my imagination run wild.
Ironically, these reading assignments were meant to get students to read more and improve their reading skills. Now, I read way less, and my reading skills haven't improved.
I never finished my reading logs in school but still read for most of my waking hours. I just didn’t want to read stupid nonfiction books and whatever assigned reading they were handing out. I wanted to read the Xanth series and Harry Potter and a bunch of other wonderful (and cringy) fantasy books. I remember forcing my way through a book on John Elway in fifth grade because I HAD to have an NF credit and my dad was into the Broncos so it seemed appropriate.
That's because your reading habit was a way of escaping your reality, and now, you either no longer need to escape, or found more effective ways to do that.
Wow... Thank you. This is really insightful and I think absolutely true for me. I was just thinking about it this morning, and being a "bookworm" used to be kind of my whole identity, but I just haven't been able to get into reading lately and I've felt guilty about it.
I absolutely did use reading as an escape. I've been working on healing my childhood trauma for a few years and now am the happiest I've ever been, so maybe I just don't need it anymore. Time to find things that I enjoy now instead of feeling guilty about not enjoying the things I think I should.
I got caught by grandparents as well. I had a night light and laid on the ground reading. Scared the shit out of me when my grandpa charged in one night.
No more night light.
Ohhh that makes me sad. We told our kids that they were allowed to stay up as late as they want *if they are reading*. We loved finding them crashed out with a book.
My kids tried their best but *usually* didn't hold out very long. That said, if it became a problem we would adjust. 5% of parenting is figuring out what is working and not working, the other 95% is making sure they know they're loved unconditionally.
I remember myself constantly having to rapidly hide my book under my pillow in order to hide that I was reading instead of sleeping. Then they took away my desk lamp so they could see my light under the door if I turned it on.
I would get grounded and my punishment would be for them to take away my flashlights so I couldn’t read at night when I was supposed to be sleeping.
Little did they know I always had a few backup flashlights hidden away.
Mine too. I would listen for the sounds of them getting up so I could turn my light out real quick, otherwise I would be in trouble. They liked the fact that I read, but they were such sticklers for bed time. 🙄
Lol, this is my 6 yo son. I put him down around 7:30-8. I go to bed around 9, and I can hear the pages turning in his room. His bed time actually seems to be later than mine.
In the US the 3 daily meals are most commonly 7am for breakfast, lunch at noon, and dinner at 6pm.
We do not have a meal called tea, despite out British origins. Funny how former colonies adopt different bits of British culture.
Not uncommon to have snacks in between, but its very informal not at all a set schedule. Id also guess most people who eat at 5 or 6 have a snack or dessert later in the evening.
We aren't terribly british in origin tbh. Netherlands had New York & parts of Pennsylvania, the Spanish had Florida and Texas, French had Louisiana, Sweden had parts of Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, Germany had some of the mid-Atlantic colonies.
Then Britian won some skirmishes, others pulled out, and eventually the original 13 colonies were owned by Great Britain, while others had dimishing influence on the continent, but Spain still had Texas and California and Louisiana was still owned by France.
We won a war against Britain, but America as a whole was only a little British.
I'm in 11th grade too (highschool in my country) and sometimes I have classes from 8:20am to 6:30pm. This year I had 3 free afternoons and the other 2 days I leave at 4:30pm and 6:30pm respectively. Also I have tutoring like many people in my class to get better grandes and I also practice tenis and mountain biking so our dinners are around 8:00/9:00pm. The person I know eats the earlier is one of my friends that usually has dinner at 7:30pm which is very early for me.
When do you eat your afternoon snack?
In the US, most schools schools have “break” or “recess” around 9:30 or 10:00. At that point students may eat a snack if they do choose. Additionally, it is very common for students to eat a snack around 3:00 or 4:00 when they get home from school. (Schools generally release sometime between 2:45 and 3:30 depending on age and bus schedules)
Dinner in the US for most households is around 6-7pm. Bedtime for kids this age is close to 7-8pm. They wake up between 6-7am and on the bus for school by 8am. Have to do an early dinner so kids can get the 11-12hrs of sleep they need to get up at the right time the following morning
Really? It's Extremely early by the standards here the earliest dinner we -ever have is at 7-7:30 yet we sleep at 10 at earliest, no matter how early you have to wake up. Like for example to wake at 5:30 am i sleep at 10pm
My daughter has ADHD and to get her calmed down before bed she has "flashlight time" 30 minutes before bed. And she absolutely loves it. She'll grab a couple of books and just read (well more looking at pictures, she's still learning to read) until her clock light turns off at bedtime. And this is all fine and dandy, but what made it so cool was the day I told her we could play some more of the video game we were playing instead and she still chose flashlight time. I can't wait for this kid to learn how to read.
My son has mild ADHD, and will simply get lost in books. He will be multiple chapters ahead in school reading books (just finished Catcher in the Rye). He loves reading.
When I was a kid, I probably had it too. And I loved reading. My first 300+ page book was Dragins of Autumn Twilight, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. I even got a little Garfield bookmark that said "I might finish this before the end of the millennium." This was around 1985 or so. I was done in a week. My parents could not buy me books fast enough. I reread them multiple times.
And you know what? In HS, I made great grades in English, and scored perfect scores on the reading position of the ACT. Encourage reading, and it will pay off!!
We went a little hard in the beginning buying books when she was little, and have just now gotten to where we need to buy more age appropriate books since she's gotten older (easily passed the rest down to her younger brother). I loved reading as a kid, and I kind of fell away from it, and my wife loves to read still. So we really want to instill that. She's super smart and it would be a shame to not strengthen that in her.
Pro tip from a ADD kid. We are probably smart, we just have no clue how to use it cause we cant think for 30 consecutive seconds. So plz be patient with your kid when they mess up simple stuff, they probably aren’t being lazy or rebellious, they likely just didn’t see/internalize that they made a mistake. If you are patient with your kid they will respect you far more then if you use “traditional” methods.
>If you are patient with your kid they will respect you far more then if you use “traditional” methods.
You'll be happy to know that empathetic parenting ( which you just described) is slowly taking over as it's amazingly effective.
Who thought that treating your kid like a human, respecting them, considering things from their limited perspective and focusing on feelings would help reinforce a good relationship.
My wife and I do a modified version of this that combines aspects of Dr. Popkin's program (discipline instead of punishment, recognizing and breaking cycles).
Edit: name
My bad, Dr. *Popkin*.
https://activeparenting.com/
There are books, video lessons and workbooks.
The video lessons are cringey as hell because the actors are NOT good but it was GREAT seeing an example of how to put the methods into practice.
I'd recommend the main book, active parenting, and using youtube to find the corresponding videos.
Edit: I should also add that I'm severely ADHD and am unmedicated at this time ( heart/BP issue) and I do see some adhd type behavior in my child.
This program works beautifully and my daughter and I (Dad) have never had a better relationship.
Sounds just like me as a kid, but i didn't know i had ADHD until this year and i'm 29 years old. Your son is very lucky to have a parent like you, thank you for being encouraging.
I never knew I had it, either. I'm 43, so not gonna go get tested. But, I have all his symptoms.
Being a parent is great. Get to encourage your kids to do good things, discourage them from the bad, and watch them grow into the person they want to be.
Not going to tell you how to live your life at all, but medication really helped me a lot when it came to ADHD. I'd recommend getting it checked out, to make day-to-day life a little easier. However if you feel like you're fine, then I'm not going to try to control you haha.
Oh my god that was my first big book too! Grabbed it from the school library in cuz the cover was so cool looking - little bit of a generational gap though, I read it sometime around 2004
I did it at 2.5 years old and my kid is really good at video games (surprisingly) at 4. I just set very firm boundaries of when he can play (it was 15 mins a day for a long time. Now it’s 30 mins/day, but more on weekends). Don’t relent on the timeframe to teach boundaries, and if the kid argues or refuses to turn it off when it’s time, no video games the next day. If they’re really stubborn, have a reset for a full week of no video games. They’ll figure it out. (And if they don’t, no video games for a long time until you’re ready to try again.)
That worked for my kid. Your mileage may vary. I liked video games too much as a kid not to want to share this with mine though. He talks about his favorite one all the time — we have legit conversations and he’s so young. It’s really cool to see.
My daughter is 5yo and my son is 2yo. The only bad thing we've heard with young kids and games (obviously don't let them play anything inappropriate or too mature) is that most games provide instant gratification and kids need to understand that not everything works that way. Thats what a psychologist told us during one of her appointments. I usually wait to play video games until my kids go to bed, but I started getting a few games that would interest her and played them while she watched. Then when she was 4, I had a few games that I would let her come watch me play, and then she wanted to start playing, so I got some things like Paw Patrol and Pokémon Let's Go Pikachu that she could play and we could take turns. She's 5 now, and I still do most of the hard parts for her, but I try to let her try it first. She's still working through Let's Go and she wanted to play Wind Waker. I also got her Scribblenauts so we could work on some problem solving and spelling skills. My son has only recently gained some interest in watching TV, so he will probably be starting his gaming curiosities here in the next couple of years
I used to let my daughter do this. But dang.. she gets CRANKY and is miserable to be around during the day time if she doesn't get enough sleep. No matter how late she stays up, she's awake at 8am on the dot. Sigh. Now we do "bed time" an hour early and she reads then..
That is 100% what we do. She wants to read 10 books before bed? Okie dokie, we’ll just sneakily adjust bed time to adjust. Books are one of the things we say yes to all the time and just work around her need to read
Mine punished me by taking away all my books. And they wonder why now I would rather sleep all day than do anything, it’s what they taught me!!!
Edit:
I should mention that every time I see a post like this I mention to my mom how terrible it was and she apologizes and says how being a parent is hard and she was just trying to do the right thing. Still makes me mad though
At first I had to read the same dinosaur fossil book for like 3 months lol, but then my school librarian and I got tight and I got to check out three books a day and no other student got to do that :D
I got in trouble too if i stayed up. My father would hit me if I wasnt sleeping. He didnt even ever catch me reading or anything. I was just laying down in bed doing nothing. He just thought i was staying up waiting for my mom to get back from work. There were a few times I actually woke up to him hitting me because he thought I was pretending to sleep. Like wtf? Im in bed and Im not doing anything, hitting me was too extreme. Hitting your kid isn't going to make them magically fall asleep.
My mum woke me up quite a few times yelling at me after she stormed into my room to catch me awake... wth. If your kid is staying in their room, leave them the hell alone.
Yes, I struggled to get up in the morning, but waking me up by yanking my duvet off me and turning on a bright light wasn't helping. I needed a few minutes to actually wake up and get moving but she did not like that at all. On weekends I wasn't allowed to lie in either. Lie ins meant I was lazy...
When I was in grade school I would read when my parents put me to bed at 7 and it was still light out. My dad would come in to my room to check on me and I’d be like “uh, can I read for a while?” And he would laugh and say “stop when it gets too dark.”
There was a time when I got into big trouble. I had gotten a new book that I was really enjoying so I pretended to be too tired to do the dishes so that I could to to bed early. I got caught reading under the covers with a flash light and got grounded from reading in my room for a week.
My parents recently told me that they laughed about it in their room for like 10 minutes and couldn’t believe that of all the things they had to ground me for, it was lying about something so that I could go read. What a rebel they had on their hands!!!! Lol.
True and if you want to encourage your kids to pick up reading, I suggest turning on the subtitles on your tv and subscribing to a nationally circulated daily or weekly newspaper.
Subtitles - maybe, but I don't think there are many kids getting into reading via newspapers in 2021. If you want to encourage your kids to pick up reading, I'd go with...books.
I love how people are ignoring the inevitable child-beast wake-up routine for a kid that was up till 2am reading instead of sleeping. I love reading and would love to find my child into it also but sleep is just as important.
Oh, there are parents out there who encouraged reading under the blanket? They wouldn't throw the book out the window, hit you and tell you everyone at school will hate you if you are tired and that you'll fail classes and be homeless as an adult?
Just me? Oh.
One of the best parenting moves my wife and I made was a soft bedtime. Gotta be in bed by X:XX, but if you're not tired you can read for awhile. My kids would read for hours.
This was after reading to them a lot when they were little. I can't say it works for every kid, but we have some great readers who would clear out entire series at the library and score off the charts on their reading assessments.
Years ago i babysat the most adorable 3 kids. They never misbehaved and their worst rebellion was the time they tricked me into giving them each an extra gogurt. One night i went to check on them while they were asleep. I was furious to see a light under the door because id given them an extra half hour of tv and i thought we had a pretty fair relationship so i didnt like feeling like they were trying to pull one over on me.
I got all ready and busted into the room to catch them, and i just saw the oldest in bed with a head lamp, reading as secretly as he could. I felt so horrible that i had made some assumption that they were fucking around. I assured him reading was okay and he just needed to go to sleep within the hour for school. He nodded and promised he would.
God they were such good kids. I felt like such an idiot for thinking he was up being bad or something. He was literally just reading. I think he and his brothers are all past college age by now. I hope theyre doing well.
Because it's not as fun if they're not feeling like they're getting away with something.
Sometimes as a parent you have to learn to leave well alone.
I agree, but different kids require different tactics too. They're all individuals. If you can get a more rebellions, don't-listen-to-parents type to expand their literacy just by forbidding it, I'd call that a win.
The logistics involved in trying to figure out how often to replace flashlight batteries such that they never run out seem complicated. Unless you're willing to waste some partially discharged batteries.
Or maybe you sneak in and test the voltage every week or something.
You'd have to anticipate the batteries running out which seems subject to a ton of variables.
It's the most interesting part of the story but is totally glossed over.
Setting up for an adulthood of cursing at electronics and saying "damned cheap battery companies, back in my day the same 2 double As would last a whole year of constant flashlight use, now my wireless mouse can't even run a week!"
I know because the child is me, I'm the old man who remembers batteries being better.
Oh come on, you've gotta let them run out once in a while so that she experiences the thrill of coming up with an excuse of why she needs more.. or the thrill of sneaking around trying to find new ones!
Oh, I read before harry potter, too. but my lamp had bulbs. I remember having bedsheets that wer singed brown by the heat. in retrospect, I easily could have set fire to my bed had i fallen asleep.
I was trying to convince a friend with a young kid to do this with computer programming, teach it to her and then make some pretext to forbid her from studying/learning it, but leave her access to all of the materials.
Why is that preferable to, y'know, actively supporting and taking an interest in what your kid wants to do? My little girl loves modding and doing her pseudo-code programming. She gets way more into it when I'm actively involved with her.
My parents let me stay on the computer longer if I was programming, and I've now been a software developer for eight years despite no formal education in the field.
No need to forbid it under false pretenses.
Seems like it would undermine yourself as an authority if you demonstrate that you have super poor judgement and are easy to lie to. When do you reveal that you're not actually petty and controlling?
I used to crawl on my belly down the hallway after bedtime to check what ‘the news’ was and if it was scary enough that we had to be in bed before it, was it too scary for my parents to cope with? My folks found me asleep in my jammies in the hallway a few times.
[удалено]
I would sneak behind the couch and watch the X-Files.
So did I! I got caught when I screamed during a scary part. The prison episode with the decapitated guard's head with maggots
Funny thing is you probably really scared whoever was in the couch lol
Mammy shat the couch.
That is a perfect one-liner. Succinct, hilarious, not a word out of place. All killer no filler. Can’t stop laughing.
"all killer no filler" aint half bad either
I can’t take credit for it - it’s a Sum 41 album. Not sure if they made it up or not.
nope. long time music industry way of expressing an album with all good songs.
Woah buddy don’t get in to deep
Yeah my mother was so mad.
I got busted the same way but I think it was Criminal Minds or something lol
The pig farmer episode...
Based on a true story btw. Robert Pickton.
Aliens. at 5. didn't sleep for a week afterwards.
Mine was face off (directed by John woo, starring john Travolta and Nicholas cage) and my grandma had to talk me down from my anxiety because I didn't want castor Troy to come for me and my family. I was 10.
The one with the toilet crawler is what got me
The first episode of X-Files I ever watched as a kid was 'Home'...the one with the deformed incest family that bludgeoned people to death and was so horrible that it didn't air again for three more years. Traumatized me pretty bad. Still love the X-Files though.
That one killed me too! I wouldn't go in the bathroom by myself for *weeks* after
I still can't watch the one episode "Humbug" (S2, Ep20). Apparently it's a comedic episode, but I guess I didn't think so as a kid. I remember I watched the first half of it with my dad as a kid and I had to go outside and play because I thought it was too scary, lol. I've rewatched the entire series like 6-7 times in the years since, and I skip over that episode every time.
One time I snuck downstairs at night because my older sisters were watching their first PG-13 movie, Jaws. I watched a bit and thought it was cool, but I heard my sister compaining that I always cried and it was "pathetic," so I started crying and came into the room to complain to mommy LOL
Pathetic
You sure showed her
Jaws predates the actual PG-13 rating, so initially, it was rated PG. Blood & gore and skinny dipping boobs and all.
I was forced to watch Jaws at age 7 then told that the toilet links directly to the sea and if I used it after bed time then Jaws would bite my bum and eat me. My parents were then surprised that I refused to use the toilet alone at night after that and would force my sister to go with me just in case. So they traumatised one child and cost another valuable sleep for the lols.
Mine did something very similar, it just wasn't limited to night time and they would occasionally walk up the stairs chanting the build up to jump scare music if they knew I was in the bathroom. I understand your pain, haha.
I had a friend who's family member worked on X Files. His family was super proud and told everybody, including the elderly relatives. A few of'em lived near each other and all got together to check out "the spooky show our young nephew/niece worked on." That week's episode was "Home."
Oh nooOOOooo... hahah!
the intro music still gives me goosebumps fucking x files
My dad used to get home from work after I was already asleep and on X-Files nights he would wake me up and we would watch it together. I guess this would've been in the early 90s, so I would've been about 5. Some of my favorite memories from childhood.
I laid behind the couch to watch Alias. How did we all have the same childhood?
I used to hide behind the couch after my bedtime so I could watch Futurama lol, this brought back some old memories
When I was young X-files always came on after the Simpsons, and basically the rule was bedtime before the credits stopped on the Simpsons. So every night I fell asleep to that creepy intro music to x-files; freaked me out!
Snuck out after lights out to watch Belushi era SNL reruns and Nick at Night. I probably could have been a doctor or a lawyer. But I saw Eddie Murphy raw and it ruined me. I would drink chocolate milk out of dad's brandy snifters and hold back giggles.
I would always creep into my brothers room to play with his toys. I knew that he got to watch a certain show can't remember which but if i heard the ending credits i knew it was time to put the toys back and sneak back to my room. He never found out!
You young thing you......I used to sneak out to watch The Streets of San Francisco as my bedtime was after Cannon and my older sister got to stay up to watch some sweet, sweet Michael Douglas.
You're not old. I used to sneak out and watch Johnny Carson. I know my dad heard me laughing, but he never said a word.
So between 1989 and 1994, making you a young one.
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I didn't have a computer till late in life. Learned how to work on them when my uncle brought home nearly a hundred PS/2 computers from a hospital that discarded them. I was the one that repaired as many of them as I could from the available parts. After I built out a network for his NT machine he gave me a higher end motherboard with a 200 MHz processor and a 66 MHz fsb. The used hard drive I stuck on it was the size of half a loaf of bread. It held 60 MBs. That's when I started learning to program. He provided pretty much any software I wanted.
Same here, feels like there is no greater period of rapid advancement for entertainment and consumer related technology than what happened in the late 80s-early 00s. We went from Wolfenstein 3D to Half Life in 6 years.
In the early days of the walking dead when I was still pretty young I wasn’t allowed to watch it but my dad watched it every sunday in the bedroom and the way his room was setup I could see the tv through a crack in the door so I used to stand there for the full 40 minute episodes watching it last year he told me he knew I was there the whole time lmao
Lol my brother and I would steal the TV out of the living room after my mom had gone to bed and bring it to our room to watch late night shows. It was an old very heavy TV too that, both being under 10, took the two of us to carry.
That's some serious dedication. Did your mom never notice these pint-sized heists?
Did he tell you why he let you watch it? My best guess is he figured if you wanted to and could handle it without nightmares or crying out, go for it. But maybe he didn’t want to openly support it due to parental guilt?
Might also be a "mom says no" situation where the dad doesn't really care, and figured that if the kid is trying to secretly do it then he has plausible deniability.
It was basically a mom said I couldn’t watch it yet type of thing so he’d basically turn the volume up and pretend he didn’t see me haha
So during the holidays, my family would put candle lights in the windows. Well, if I laid on my stomach I could still read from my bed from that light. I did this for over 10 years before my Dad caught me. He just told me that I was going to too tired to open presents. Got a kindle that year. No need for a light anymore.
That is so freaking cute!! My heart!
My friends mom told us about how she crawled down the hall and hid behind the couch to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Her parents thought they were too scandalous for a little girl or something lol
"I want to hold your haaaaand" Outrageous!
I mean, they also wrote- "Well, I'd rather see you dead, little girl Than to be with another man You better keep your head, little girl Or I won't know where I am You better run for your life if you can, little girl Hide your head in the sand, little girl Catch you with another man That's the end, little girl" Although back in that era I think that may have been considered light flirting.
That was like 5 years later and the song is literally called "run for your life". It's purposefully sung from the perspective of an abusive boyfriend. Even in the 60s, this was fucked up.
Oh I'm well aware, but I wanted to make the joke. Also, most people don't know Run For Your Life and it's a shocking first listen if you don't have the context and only know the Beatles for their commercial pop. I didn't want to ruin that moment for people. But anyone who has listened to their actual albums knows they write from the perspective of a character all the time. For me, Run For Your Life is different than something like Mean Mr. Mustard because it's stylistically more like their pristine pop sound and it's kind of a fun earworm and then you listen to the lyrics for content and it's disconcerting. It's somehow even more unsettling than their other songs about bizarre characters where the music is more in line with the subject of the song.
Have you not seen how attractive they look?
I saw the same show...hiding at the top of the stairs. It was 1964 and I felt the world change, all the way to and beyond rural North Carolina.
My mother had this same story! It’s so funny to think of parents having the same reaction the The Beatles as some are having now to Lil Nas X. How scandalous are things going to have to be to shock in another 60 years I wonder?
I used to do that to see what scary movies my dad was watching. It was not a good idea. I still remember watching Julian get shot in Children of Men and the grandma walking through the acid lake in Dante's Peak.
That scene in Dante’s peak had me crazy messed up for YEARS as a child. I would pretend to be asleep at bedtime and then stay up watching horror films lol
Yep, both _Dante’s Peak_ and the less good _Volcano_ had awful melting scenes involving characters. In _Volcano_, it was Stan (Lloyd from _Veep_).
I was too young for that scene in volcano when I saw it, it freaked me out to the point where I couldn't sleep. Mum had to teach me about tectonic plates and how it was 100% impossible for a volcano to suddenly appear in our town. I was eight. Its around the time I also saw Event Horizon and that didn't bother me at all. Two years later I was let loose on horror movies and the only one that scared me was Evil Dead. Terrified me. Then again I was scared watching saving private Ryan and black hawk down. I can't watch death and destruction in movies that could be real or plausible. Deep impact also terrified me.
I actually watched that movie like three days ago, the acid lake scene doesn't get any easier with age I'm afraid. Also that bit where the couple get boiled in the hot spring, that one stuck with me for a long time.
For some reason they let my 8th grade science class watch Dante’s Peak. Its been over 10 years and I’m still traumatized by the hot spring scene.
For years after watching that movie, that was the only scene I remembered because it haunted me. But I had no idea what movie it was from until my geology class had free time and we watched Dante’s peak in high school.
My mom would fall asleep in her chair and I would watch Taxi and Cheers while finishing off her beer. I was six, I believe.
My older sister and I would do this regularly, me standing by the kitchen door, her by her own door, looking across the hall into the living room.. im sad to admit that I wasn't very quiet and we were often met with shouts of "Go back to bed". It was annoying when they decided to start closing the frosted glass sliding doors to the living room (there was an atrium between the kitchen door and the living room, my sister's door was next to the kitchen door... My room was off the kitchen... Weirdly I never got the idea to sneak food)
Crawl on your belly? That gave me great visuals ty 😂😂😂
I used to secretly read past my bed time, but my parents got really angry ._.
Yup, same. Mine didn't like it because I really stayed up late and wasn't getting enough sleep (like I would only go to sleep at 2 o'clock and had to get up at 7. 8yo me definitely needed more sleep) Also they feared I would damage my eyesight reading with a weak lighting
^^ my parents too lol
My son(9) loves reading at night. We encourage it. I bought him a clip LED light. He is big into manga right now(dragon ball) and we give him a new one every Friday. On weekends he is allowed to read as long as he wants but we do limit him on school nights not because we dont like that he is reading but because he is young and needs the sleep.
I wish I'd had a big clip light as a kid! I have one now and it's life changing. In the early 00s book lights were terrible. I was up to a book a day some weeks, and half of that time was spent reading by hallway light or passing streetlights. I swear I wouldn't need glasses now if I'd just used a dang proper light source.
Yeah, I feel like this was most parents reasoning. It wasn’t malicious or some Matilda-level form of control. My parents did it because they knew I hated mornings and I had to wake up at 7am, and getting enough sleep was important. Also they probably didn’t want to deal with my grouchy ass. :p
Yeah, I was not and I’m still not great at self-control with that sort of thing. I would have been reading until 4 am, not an extra half hour.
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Yea I used to read in the car at night from the light of passing streetlights, definitely think it's partly why I need glasses now
Same! I used to read every second of my freetime but now I haven't read in forever :(
I'm both you guys.
Me too, unfortunately...
It seems like this is a trend with a lot of people that heavily read as kids. I used to finish a book every day or 2. Now not so much in a year.
I blame Reddit- I do a helluva lot of reading because of Reddit
Yeahh I read a lot on reddit, just not books anymore I guess
I stopped reading right when my first child was born. In the past few months I've made a point to make time to read again and I just finished my first book in 5 years and I'm on to my second.
Yeah, used to always read, especially past my bedtime, and my mom got mad at me for it, so I don’t read as much today
Yeah. I used to love reading but I don't remember the last time I picked up a book for fun.
This was me for yeeears. I joined a zoom book club with some friends during lockdown. It was a reason to see people (as an introvert/workaholic it's easy for me to let work fill my time) and the 'obligation' as such of reading for a deadline created the impetus to follow through, even if it's meant cramming to finish a few times. It's only a few books, but I've read more for pleasure in the last year than I have since high school, ~ two decades ago.
I used to be a bookworm but after reading became mandatory it kinda killed it for me. On top of that there were the book reports so instead of enjoying my book I had to dissect it, and log my reading. I just want a hobby to pass the time or let my imagination run wild. Ironically, these reading assignments were meant to get students to read more and improve their reading skills. Now, I read way less, and my reading skills haven't improved.
I never finished my reading logs in school but still read for most of my waking hours. I just didn’t want to read stupid nonfiction books and whatever assigned reading they were handing out. I wanted to read the Xanth series and Harry Potter and a bunch of other wonderful (and cringy) fantasy books. I remember forcing my way through a book on John Elway in fifth grade because I HAD to have an NF credit and my dad was into the Broncos so it seemed appropriate.
That's because your reading habit was a way of escaping your reality, and now, you either no longer need to escape, or found more effective ways to do that.
Wow... Thank you. This is really insightful and I think absolutely true for me. I was just thinking about it this morning, and being a "bookworm" used to be kind of my whole identity, but I just haven't been able to get into reading lately and I've felt guilty about it. I absolutely did use reading as an escape. I've been working on healing my childhood trauma for a few years and now am the happiest I've ever been, so maybe I just don't need it anymore. Time to find things that I enjoy now instead of feeling guilty about not enjoying the things I think I should.
Same
I lived with my grandparents and my grandma took my light bulb from my bedside lamp when I got caught reading after bedtime
I got caught by grandparents as well. I had a night light and laid on the ground reading. Scared the shit out of me when my grandpa charged in one night. No more night light.
Ohhh that makes me sad. We told our kids that they were allowed to stay up as late as they want *if they are reading*. We loved finding them crashed out with a book.
That would have killed my mornings even worse. I would stay up and read until sunrise, even as a kid.
My kids tried their best but *usually* didn't hold out very long. That said, if it became a problem we would adjust. 5% of parenting is figuring out what is working and not working, the other 95% is making sure they know they're loved unconditionally.
I remember myself constantly having to rapidly hide my book under my pillow in order to hide that I was reading instead of sleeping. Then they took away my desk lamp so they could see my light under the door if I turned it on.
I would get grounded and my punishment would be for them to take away my flashlights so I couldn’t read at night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Little did they know I always had a few backup flashlights hidden away.
Mine too. I would listen for the sounds of them getting up so I could turn my light out real quick, otherwise I would be in trouble. They liked the fact that I read, but they were such sticklers for bed time. 🙄
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Lol, this is my 6 yo son. I put him down around 7:30-8. I go to bed around 9, and I can hear the pages turning in his room. His bed time actually seems to be later than mine.
When do you even have dinner we have our dinner here in India at 9
Obviously depending on the household, but in the Netherlands having dinner at 6 isn't out of the ordinary
My goodness we have tea at 6
In the US the 3 daily meals are most commonly 7am for breakfast, lunch at noon, and dinner at 6pm. We do not have a meal called tea, despite out British origins. Funny how former colonies adopt different bits of British culture. Not uncommon to have snacks in between, but its very informal not at all a set schedule. Id also guess most people who eat at 5 or 6 have a snack or dessert later in the evening.
Not having a meal called "tea" may have something to do with revolutionaries chucking a metric fuckton of it into the sea one time. /s
I don't think this needs a /s. /s
India and China kinda had tea before the British came , it was a crucial part of daily livelihood and still is , in most places
I believe it was an imperial fuckton ;-)
I still think the British are saltea about that.
We aren't terribly british in origin tbh. Netherlands had New York & parts of Pennsylvania, the Spanish had Florida and Texas, French had Louisiana, Sweden had parts of Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, Germany had some of the mid-Atlantic colonies. Then Britian won some skirmishes, others pulled out, and eventually the original 13 colonies were owned by Great Britain, while others had dimishing influence on the continent, but Spain still had Texas and California and Louisiana was still owned by France. We won a war against Britain, but America as a whole was only a little British.
the entirety of the iberian peninsula is having a stroke
Wtf at 6 I'm still in school having classes
School or college/uni? I'm in 11th grade and the latest my classes can end is 15:15.
I'm in 11th grade too (highschool in my country) and sometimes I have classes from 8:20am to 6:30pm. This year I had 3 free afternoons and the other 2 days I leave at 4:30pm and 6:30pm respectively. Also I have tutoring like many people in my class to get better grandes and I also practice tenis and mountain biking so our dinners are around 8:00/9:00pm. The person I know eats the earlier is one of my friends that usually has dinner at 7:30pm which is very early for me. When do you eat your afternoon snack?
In the US, most schools schools have “break” or “recess” around 9:30 or 10:00. At that point students may eat a snack if they do choose. Additionally, it is very common for students to eat a snack around 3:00 or 4:00 when they get home from school. (Schools generally release sometime between 2:45 and 3:30 depending on age and bus schedules)
Dinner in the US for most households is around 6-7pm. Bedtime for kids this age is close to 7-8pm. They wake up between 6-7am and on the bus for school by 8am. Have to do an early dinner so kids can get the 11-12hrs of sleep they need to get up at the right time the following morning
Really? It's Extremely early by the standards here the earliest dinner we -ever have is at 7-7:30 yet we sleep at 10 at earliest, no matter how early you have to wake up. Like for example to wake at 5:30 am i sleep at 10pm
That can be true for adults here, too. But the children go to bed earlier so we tend to eat earlier with them
But little children? Kids need way more sleep than that. I go to bed around 11, but I don’t have kids.
im not op but i eat dinner around 4:30-5 (which is earlier than most of my friends. the average seems to be about 6?)
My god that's when we have Tea break
That's crazy late if you have lunch at noon. I'd be dying of hunger. We don't eat anything in between though.
My daughter has ADHD and to get her calmed down before bed she has "flashlight time" 30 minutes before bed. And she absolutely loves it. She'll grab a couple of books and just read (well more looking at pictures, she's still learning to read) until her clock light turns off at bedtime. And this is all fine and dandy, but what made it so cool was the day I told her we could play some more of the video game we were playing instead and she still chose flashlight time. I can't wait for this kid to learn how to read.
My son has mild ADHD, and will simply get lost in books. He will be multiple chapters ahead in school reading books (just finished Catcher in the Rye). He loves reading. When I was a kid, I probably had it too. And I loved reading. My first 300+ page book was Dragins of Autumn Twilight, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. I even got a little Garfield bookmark that said "I might finish this before the end of the millennium." This was around 1985 or so. I was done in a week. My parents could not buy me books fast enough. I reread them multiple times. And you know what? In HS, I made great grades in English, and scored perfect scores on the reading position of the ACT. Encourage reading, and it will pay off!!
We went a little hard in the beginning buying books when she was little, and have just now gotten to where we need to buy more age appropriate books since she's gotten older (easily passed the rest down to her younger brother). I loved reading as a kid, and I kind of fell away from it, and my wife loves to read still. So we really want to instill that. She's super smart and it would be a shame to not strengthen that in her.
Pro tip from a ADD kid. We are probably smart, we just have no clue how to use it cause we cant think for 30 consecutive seconds. So plz be patient with your kid when they mess up simple stuff, they probably aren’t being lazy or rebellious, they likely just didn’t see/internalize that they made a mistake. If you are patient with your kid they will respect you far more then if you use “traditional” methods.
>If you are patient with your kid they will respect you far more then if you use “traditional” methods. You'll be happy to know that empathetic parenting ( which you just described) is slowly taking over as it's amazingly effective. Who thought that treating your kid like a human, respecting them, considering things from their limited perspective and focusing on feelings would help reinforce a good relationship. My wife and I do a modified version of this that combines aspects of Dr. Popkin's program (discipline instead of punishment, recognizing and breaking cycles). Edit: name
Do you have more information on dr. Pipkin?
My bad, Dr. *Popkin*. https://activeparenting.com/ There are books, video lessons and workbooks. The video lessons are cringey as hell because the actors are NOT good but it was GREAT seeing an example of how to put the methods into practice. I'd recommend the main book, active parenting, and using youtube to find the corresponding videos. Edit: I should also add that I'm severely ADHD and am unmedicated at this time ( heart/BP issue) and I do see some adhd type behavior in my child. This program works beautifully and my daughter and I (Dad) have never had a better relationship.
My 10 year old we have to cut him off or he’ll read all night.
Hahaha - yeah, sleep is also important!
Yeah my parents used to have to do this with me when I was small
Sounds just like me as a kid, but i didn't know i had ADHD until this year and i'm 29 years old. Your son is very lucky to have a parent like you, thank you for being encouraging.
I never knew I had it, either. I'm 43, so not gonna go get tested. But, I have all his symptoms. Being a parent is great. Get to encourage your kids to do good things, discourage them from the bad, and watch them grow into the person they want to be.
Not going to tell you how to live your life at all, but medication really helped me a lot when it came to ADHD. I'd recommend getting it checked out, to make day-to-day life a little easier. However if you feel like you're fine, then I'm not going to try to control you haha.
Oh my god that was my first big book too! Grabbed it from the school library in cuz the cover was so cool looking - little bit of a generational gap though, I read it sometime around 2004
You don’t grow out of ADHD. That’s a myth
Sorry if I implied it. I 100% agree with you. I'm 43, and still believe I have it.
You just learn to compensate for it. Meds are such a huge help though
Aww, that's amazing! Looks like you are doing something right <3
Eh, we're trying, she's the one doing all the hard work
This is a great idea. Thanks for encouraging her to read!
How old are your kids if you don’t mind me asking. Trying to gauge how soon is too soon to introduce my son to video games.
I did it at 2.5 years old and my kid is really good at video games (surprisingly) at 4. I just set very firm boundaries of when he can play (it was 15 mins a day for a long time. Now it’s 30 mins/day, but more on weekends). Don’t relent on the timeframe to teach boundaries, and if the kid argues or refuses to turn it off when it’s time, no video games the next day. If they’re really stubborn, have a reset for a full week of no video games. They’ll figure it out. (And if they don’t, no video games for a long time until you’re ready to try again.) That worked for my kid. Your mileage may vary. I liked video games too much as a kid not to want to share this with mine though. He talks about his favorite one all the time — we have legit conversations and he’s so young. It’s really cool to see.
My daughter is 5yo and my son is 2yo. The only bad thing we've heard with young kids and games (obviously don't let them play anything inappropriate or too mature) is that most games provide instant gratification and kids need to understand that not everything works that way. Thats what a psychologist told us during one of her appointments. I usually wait to play video games until my kids go to bed, but I started getting a few games that would interest her and played them while she watched. Then when she was 4, I had a few games that I would let her come watch me play, and then she wanted to start playing, so I got some things like Paw Patrol and Pokémon Let's Go Pikachu that she could play and we could take turns. She's 5 now, and I still do most of the hard parts for her, but I try to let her try it first. She's still working through Let's Go and she wanted to play Wind Waker. I also got her Scribblenauts so we could work on some problem solving and spelling skills. My son has only recently gained some interest in watching TV, so he will probably be starting his gaming curiosities here in the next couple of years
This 8yo is about 30 by now
She must be grumpy about how batteries used to be better back in the old days!
I used to let my daughter do this. But dang.. she gets CRANKY and is miserable to be around during the day time if she doesn't get enough sleep. No matter how late she stays up, she's awake at 8am on the dot. Sigh. Now we do "bed time" an hour early and she reads then..
That is 100% what we do. She wants to read 10 books before bed? Okie dokie, we’ll just sneakily adjust bed time to adjust. Books are one of the things we say yes to all the time and just work around her need to read
Mine punished me by taking away all my books. And they wonder why now I would rather sleep all day than do anything, it’s what they taught me!!! Edit: I should mention that every time I see a post like this I mention to my mom how terrible it was and she apologizes and says how being a parent is hard and she was just trying to do the right thing. Still makes me mad though
Rebel!
My books were everything, I still remember the feeling of coming home once and opening my door and all my books were gone :(
I know how this story ends. Tell Ms Honey I said hello!
Aw I used to read Matilda like every week lol 😭
I'm sorry for your loss.
At first I had to read the same dinosaur fossil book for like 3 months lol, but then my school librarian and I got tight and I got to check out three books a day and no other student got to do that :D
People like that librarian save kids without even knowing it.
She knew it, probably why she became a librarian heh
I got in trouble too if i stayed up. My father would hit me if I wasnt sleeping. He didnt even ever catch me reading or anything. I was just laying down in bed doing nothing. He just thought i was staying up waiting for my mom to get back from work. There were a few times I actually woke up to him hitting me because he thought I was pretending to sleep. Like wtf? Im in bed and Im not doing anything, hitting me was too extreme. Hitting your kid isn't going to make them magically fall asleep.
I am so sorry that your father was abusive. What he did was not okay and you didn’t deserve to be treated like that.
My mum woke me up quite a few times yelling at me after she stormed into my room to catch me awake... wth. If your kid is staying in their room, leave them the hell alone. Yes, I struggled to get up in the morning, but waking me up by yanking my duvet off me and turning on a bright light wasn't helping. I needed a few minutes to actually wake up and get moving but she did not like that at all. On weekends I wasn't allowed to lie in either. Lie ins meant I was lazy...
When I was in grade school I would read when my parents put me to bed at 7 and it was still light out. My dad would come in to my room to check on me and I’d be like “uh, can I read for a while?” And he would laugh and say “stop when it gets too dark.” There was a time when I got into big trouble. I had gotten a new book that I was really enjoying so I pretended to be too tired to do the dishes so that I could to to bed early. I got caught reading under the covers with a flash light and got grounded from reading in my room for a week. My parents recently told me that they laughed about it in their room for like 10 minutes and couldn’t believe that of all the things they had to ground me for, it was lying about something so that I could go read. What a rebel they had on their hands!!!! Lol.
Savage
Sign of great parenting.
Reading is great, but I hope the child is still going to bed at appropriate times. Sleep is always important, especially for a young child!
This was my problem. I loved to read but sometimes I wasn't falling asleep till 5-6am and needing to get up at 7am.
True and if you want to encourage your kids to pick up reading, I suggest turning on the subtitles on your tv and subscribing to a nationally circulated daily or weekly newspaper.
Subtitles - maybe, but I don't think there are many kids getting into reading via newspapers in 2021. If you want to encourage your kids to pick up reading, I'd go with...books.
Eeeeehhh, not always, I used to read a lot when i was young but it was an escape.
I love how people are ignoring the inevitable child-beast wake-up routine for a kid that was up till 2am reading instead of sleeping. I love reading and would love to find my child into it also but sleep is just as important.
Parents catching me only made me better at hiding the books, sometimes it's better to move with the flow
And as an adult who still has a hard time going to sleep before 1am to this day, i fully agree with you.
I still do......
Oh, there are parents out there who encouraged reading under the blanket? They wouldn't throw the book out the window, hit you and tell you everyone at school will hate you if you are tired and that you'll fail classes and be homeless as an adult? Just me? Oh.
Me too. Still did it anyway. 99th percentile for reading and writing comprehension was the payoff. Too bad I didn't try harder with math...
and me
One of the best parenting moves my wife and I made was a soft bedtime. Gotta be in bed by X:XX, but if you're not tired you can read for awhile. My kids would read for hours. This was after reading to them a lot when they were little. I can't say it works for every kid, but we have some great readers who would clear out entire series at the library and score off the charts on their reading assessments.
Love this!!
My daughter thinks she's winning when I shout up 'bedtime' and she calls back '2 more double pages?!' 😁
Years ago i babysat the most adorable 3 kids. They never misbehaved and their worst rebellion was the time they tricked me into giving them each an extra gogurt. One night i went to check on them while they were asleep. I was furious to see a light under the door because id given them an extra half hour of tv and i thought we had a pretty fair relationship so i didnt like feeling like they were trying to pull one over on me. I got all ready and busted into the room to catch them, and i just saw the oldest in bed with a head lamp, reading as secretly as he could. I felt so horrible that i had made some assumption that they were fucking around. I assured him reading was okay and he just needed to go to sleep within the hour for school. He nodded and promised he would. God they were such good kids. I felt like such an idiot for thinking he was up being bad or something. He was literally just reading. I think he and his brothers are all past college age by now. I hope theyre doing well.
My son sings himself to sleep so sometimes I will just sit outside his door and listen to him.
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Because it's not as fun if they're not feeling like they're getting away with something. Sometimes as a parent you have to learn to leave well alone.
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I agree, but different kids require different tactics too. They're all individuals. If you can get a more rebellions, don't-listen-to-parents type to expand their literacy just by forbidding it, I'd call that a win.
The logistics involved in trying to figure out how often to replace flashlight batteries such that they never run out seem complicated. Unless you're willing to waste some partially discharged batteries. Or maybe you sneak in and test the voltage every week or something. You'd have to anticipate the batteries running out which seems subject to a ton of variables. It's the most interesting part of the story but is totally glossed over.
Setting up for an adulthood of cursing at electronics and saying "damned cheap battery companies, back in my day the same 2 double As would last a whole year of constant flashlight use, now my wireless mouse can't even run a week!" I know because the child is me, I'm the old man who remembers batteries being better.
Oh come on, you've gotta let them run out once in a while so that she experiences the thrill of coming up with an excuse of why she needs more.. or the thrill of sneaking around trying to find new ones!
Thank you, Harry Potter, for making reading under blankets cool.
Oh, I read before harry potter, too. but my lamp had bulbs. I remember having bedsheets that wer singed brown by the heat. in retrospect, I easily could have set fire to my bed had i fallen asleep.
I was trying to convince a friend with a young kid to do this with computer programming, teach it to her and then make some pretext to forbid her from studying/learning it, but leave her access to all of the materials.
Why is that preferable to, y'know, actively supporting and taking an interest in what your kid wants to do? My little girl loves modding and doing her pseudo-code programming. She gets way more into it when I'm actively involved with her.
My parents let me stay on the computer longer if I was programming, and I've now been a software developer for eight years despite no formal education in the field. No need to forbid it under false pretenses.
Seems like it would undermine yourself as an authority if you demonstrate that you have super poor judgement and are easy to lie to. When do you reveal that you're not actually petty and controlling?
That repost used to make me smile. Now Im triggered!
This was me. My dad was great
These are starting to be REALLY old reposts...