Navigating life with littles can be touch and go, especially when it comes to things like bedtime routines and school drop-offs. I am by no means an expert, but here is my favorite bedtime hack that helps us survive bedtime.
We have struggled at bedtime with my 4-year-old for a very long time. She is the queen of stall tactics, and just flat-out refuses to go to bed. After trying many, many strategies, we finally landed on one that has helped.
**As I sit on my couch typing this post, I have been interrupted no less than 4 times by a child who will not stay in bed. It is 9:30pm. Progress is not linear, and I make no claims for perfection.
The Bedtime Checklist
I had a vision in my mind of a pre-populated checklist that matched our bedtime routine and provided a mechanism for my 4-year-old to mark off the items as she completed them. After weeks of searching for this mythical tool, I gave up looking.
I finally found these customizable checklists on Amazon. Although it took some work to format the paper insert, it has been really helpful in creating a consistent, visual routine that my 4-year-old can feel in charge of.
To save you all the time and trouble of figuring out how to properly space a document to fit in the mold, I am sharing the template that I made.
In case your bedtime routine doesn’t exactly match ours, I am also sharing a link to an editable version. This way you can customize it to your liking. To preserve the original for everyone’s use, you’ll need to save a copy to your own Canva account (you can make one for free if you don’t have one) before you can make edits.
If you give this a try, let us know how it goes! What tasks did you keep, and which ones did you swap out?
