Confessions of an Obsessive Parent

or; smashing the bedtime routine into lots of tiny pieces with a massive sledgehammer

Hi! This is Some Other Dad—the weekly newsletter about the day-to-day joys and challenges we face as parents. Click the button below to subscribe for free!

Since becoming a dad, I have made a shocking discovery about myself: I’m an obsessive parent.

Well, it’s not that shocking. Truth be told, the signs were always there.

I’d always stay way later than expected in the office finishing a piece of work rather than delegate it to a colleague (because someone else might have gotten it wrong). When travelling, I’d look up floor plans of the airports I’d be laying over in¹ to look for the fastest route to our connection—and then get annoyed when the flight got in 45 minutes early and all my planning (see also: stressing) was for naught. I even remember a roommate in university remarking over how I was “a bit fucking keen” whilst I was setting up corner kick routines for my team whilst we played a network game of Football Manager. Apparently most people who play that game don’t do that—how strange.

But despite all that, I think I assumed I’d be different as a parent. I held in my mind an image of a dad who was never uptight and just went with the flow with the whole parenting thing; one who didn’t obsess about how muddy his kids got in the park, or whether they put the lids back on the right pens.

I hold that image up today, and then Simpsons-style, the camera pans to the dad I actually am, and I say “why don’t I parent like that?!”

That’s maybe a bit unfair to myself. I make a big effort to not micromanage every aspect of my eldest daughter’s day, but the emphasis there is on the word try. Like, I really have to be in the present moment and fucking try my damn hardest not to revert back to type and start railroading her again.

I have one aspect of parenting, however, that I’ve always struggled with when it comes to vanquishing the worst of my obsessive tendencies:

Bedtime.

Even just typing the word sends a slight shudder down my spine².

I’m not really sure why, but when our eldest was about four months old and we really started to make an effort to put our daughter down to sleep, leave the room and sit downstairs and watch TV— you know, an actual evening together, like normal people—I became obsessed with the whole procedure. I guess it was a result of my wife doing the breastfeeds, and then me taking care of settling the baby to sleep in the early days that did it. Whatever it was, I was hooked on everything bedtime.

I made intricate mental notes about which white noise track worked best; just how the lighting in the nursery should be; the different rhythms and tempos by which I would rock her, and the effectiveness of each. I came to have a really good knowledge of just how to get her to fall asleep.

But as with every overplayed strength, my obsession with the bedtime ritual became my weakness—I couldn’t let go of the reins.

Firstly, this manifested in me being unable to let anyone else take over the bedtime regimen. I say anyone—this was all happening under coronavirus restrictions, so anyone means my wife.

If our daughter would wake, I’d be the one to go in there—first out of habit, but then out of my inability to delegate the situation. I’d rather have spent hours in that room—driving myself to distraction trying my unwritten playbook of tricks to get her back to sleep—than take a break for half an hour and let my wife take over for a bit. I was creating myself as some sort of martyr, all because I couldn’t let go of my control obsession around my daughter’s sleep.

Things got better as her sleep navigated teething and all the sleep regressions, until she reached two years old and moved into a toddler bed. Wake-free nights were a regularity, the sleep time routine was easy to implement, and I felt able to let my white-knuckled grip of those reins ease a bit.

That was right up until our second was born, and my iron grip over bedtimes took hold once again.

As I mentioned before, my daughter got some anxiety around bedtimes due to the circumstances around our second daughter’s birth. It led to her stretching out bedtime with all kinds of requests and just-one-more’s, to the point where she wasn’t going to bed until near 10pm.

Once we’d cracked the reason for this behaviour, my inner obsessive dad saw an opportunity—yes, I was going to construct another bedtime routine that I would preside over like a pound shop dictator.

It wasn’t perfect, by any stretch; in fact, it incorporated many of her bedtime-stretching techniques. But for the sake of actually reintroducing some structure to our evenings post-baby birth, I went with a compromised approach:

• Bathtime

• Pyjamas on, goodnight kiss with mummy and sister #1

• Two bedtime stories, read by me whilst both lying in her bed

• Potty trip

• Goodnight kiss with mummy and sister #2

• Into bed, goodnight kiss from daddy

• Trying (and failing) to get her to fall asleep in bed, resort to rocking her to sleep like I did when she was a baby

This would often get stretched out by potty trip #2, goodnight kiss with mummy and sister #3, and even some costume changes—the addition or removal of socks was her go-to.

I persevered with this farce for weeks. Given the anxiety she’d been having, I was happy to indulge the regression to rocking for a bit. Combining that with my inability to deviate from an established plan—especially one around bedtime, the one aspect of parenting that lives in my head rent-free—I could have been slogging away like this forever.

It a combination of the heat³ and back pain that one night recently, after the ticking off all the items on this new bedtime routine list that I said to my wife “I’m not sure how much longer I can do all that for.”

Well, let’s just say that not for the first time—and maybe the last? No, almost certainly not the last time, don’t be so silly, Brad—my wife gave me a reality check.

“It’s all you,” she said.

She was right. I was the one imposing this routine on our daughter. The rigidity of our evenings wasn’t for her—it was for me. Each time she resisted the next step, it was because she was trying to tell me that she didn’t want to do bedtimes like this any more. She’s been thrashing and kicking during story time for weeks because she was trying to break free from the ironclad structure I’d try to box her into. Three-year-olds are free-range, and this was her way of reminding me.

It made perfect sense, now that I thought about it. One of the things that rocked my world the most about parenting is the drain on your own free time. As someone who loves writing and being creative, that free time was really valuable to me. So trying to do things for my own enjoyment after the birth of our first—and once every waking moment becomes about something and someone else—was a culture shock. The only way I could seek to remedy this was to bring order to the chaos; to perfect the bedtime routine to such an extent, that I’d be able to claw back some of those precious minutes each day.

But I’d gone too far. I’d lost sight of what was best for my daughter. I meant no ill will, but I needed shaking out of my derangement. What I was doing was not working—in fact, it was making things worse, for both of us.

Coincidentally, in a therapy session I had just a few days previously, I was introduced to Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages of Development. Whilst talking about my own experiences, we discussed the second stage of this that occurs between years 1-3: Autonomy vs Doubt.

You know the wildest thing about this? Apparently, I’m in my middle age already. Guess I’ll go buy a motorcycle or something.

Here, Erikson states that at this age it is important for parents to allow children to “explore the limits of their abilities within an encouraging environment that is tolerant of failure”, and that if children are criticised, overly-controlled, or not given the opportunity to assert themselves, it can leave them doubting their own abilities.

It’s safe to say, this was the push I needed to make a change.

So I’ve taken a sledgehammer to the bedtime routine. Once she’s in those pyjamas and in her bedroom, I sit in the corner with a book and let her do what her body tells her she needs. If she needs some more time playing, she can have it. If she doesn’t want story time, no problem.

The idea of doing this before would have sent me into a nervous frenzy. I’d probably have said things like:

“bUt ShE nEeDs RoUtInE!”

“wE’vE aLwAyS dOnE sToRyTiMe!”

“wHaT iF sHe NeVeR gOeS tO sLeEp?!”

All those hypothetical—but probably very realistic, in my case—statements come from a place of fear: of giving up my free-time, of change, of the unknown. But that past me needn’t have been scared, because my daughter has taken to this new loosey-goosey bedtime approach like a…well, goose to water. She has more freedom to get all of her left-over energy out⁴, she doesn’t feel so pressured and micro-managed, and she actually does listen to her body by taking herself off to bed once she’s tired herself out.

I don’t often feel that comfortable nor qualified to give advice here, but if you find yourself in a similar controlling rut in any aspect of your parenting, or if you’re always in a constant power-struggle about one particular part of your child’s day-to-day routine, try taking a sledgehammer to whatever regimen you may have boxed yourselves into, and hand back some of that autonomy to your child.

Like me, you might be surprised by what happens.

---

What’s your parenting obsession?

For me at least, working hard not to be an obsessive parent in certain aspects is an ongoing battle. I think we probably all have our moments of wanting to micromanage parts of our child’s routine. Is there anything that you’ve obsessed about before when it comes to parenting? How did you overcome it? As ever, here’s that button again:

---

Thank you for reading!

I’ve been writing Some Other Dad for about three months now, and I’ve loved doing it. I really believe in the value of people’s lives experiences of parenthood in making those struggling feel seen, and not on their own. I’ve taken great encouragement and strength from this in the past myself, and I hope that my posts here have done that for you too.

Not only do I want to carry on writing here for the long-term, but I want to do more of it.

Today I’ve opened up Pledges. If you’re a subscriber already, you’ll have noticed the button at the top of the page (if you’re on the website) and throughout this post that says Pledge Your Support. If you’re not subscribed yet and want to do so, you’ll see the Pledges screen after you enter your email address.

Either way, making a Pledge to Some Other Dad is a way of showing that you value my work and that you’d be interested in a paid subscription in the (hopefully near) future.

Just to be clear, you will always get one essay a week from me for free. Even if you don’t want to pledge or become a paid subscriber in the future, you’ll still get everything you get now.

But if you want to show that you appreciate my work, and if you would like more of what I do, then pledging your support for a future paid subscription would be massively appreciated, and will help me keep Some Other Dad going.

Here’s some more information on Pledges and how they work.

---

Previously on Some Other Dad

Other recent issues

Comparison Culture

Absent Without Leave

We’re Just Normal Dads

Surviving the Newborn Night Shift

1. Anyone who's travelled through O’Hare will surely agree with me when I say that it’s a fucking awful place.

2. Or maybe that’s just back spasms from all the nappy changes.

3. Before anyone writes to say “you think British summers are hot? Try living in Meltingface, Arizona where it’s a million degrees all the time”, I’m acknowledging right here that I don’t cope well in any hot temperatures. Like, at all. I’d wear shorts and t-shirt all year around if I could. Huskies are my spirit animal.

4. Of which there’s a startling amount. Seriously, I can’t wait for full days at school just to tire her out a bit.