When our daughter was about one and a half, bedtime was difficult.
The slow, grinding kind of difficult that makes you question every life choice you have made by 8:47 p.m. Endless negotiating. Little bursts of crying. A child who seemed almost asleep, and then somehow fully reactivated the second we tried to leave the room.
One exhausted evening, out of pure desperation, I invented a song on the fly.
The lyrics were not good.
Actually, they were quite terrible. Simply embarrassing.
But hey, they worked. And in our house the rule is: if it looks stupid, but it works, it’s not stupid. Translated from Dutch:
“And now we close the door…”
That was basically the whole song. It went something like this:
And now we close the door,
and now we close the door,
and now we close the door,
and Papa and Mama are leaving.
And Papa and Mama are leaving,
and the door is going to be closed.
Good night!
And then we closed the door.
That was it. A basic song about a door doing exactly what a door was about to do.
Just two exhausted, sweaty parents singing off-key, praying for their child to go to sleep.
The dance we had to do to complete the ritual still haunts my dreams.
Not exactly a parenting-book-worthy or social media ready bedtime routine.
But somehow, it worked.
Not every single night, of course. Let us not get unrealistic. But enough that it became one of those strange little family rituals that firmly earns its place.
For her, the song became a signal.
A clear ending. A countdown. A small piece of predictability in a moment that had previously felt too sudden, too uncertain, or too open for negotiation.
The door was not suddenly closing. We were counting down to it.
The room was not suddenly changing.
Papa and Mama were not suddenly disappearing.
The song told her what was happening before it happened, and that seemed to make the transition easier for her to accept.
Sometimes toddlers do not need better arguments. They need clearer transitions.
That is easy to forget when you are tired. You start explaining, convincing, repeating, negotiating, and trying to make the logic land. But a toddler is not always resisting because they disagree with your reasoning.
Sometimes they are resisting because the shift feels too abrupt.
Play to sleep.
Light to dark.
Company to separation.
Noise to quiet.
That is a lot for a small child.
A tiny ritual can soften that shift.
It gives the child something familiar to hold on to while the moment changes around them. It says, we have done this before, we know what comes next, and you are safe inside this pattern.
The ritual does not need to be impressive.
It does not need to be beautiful. It needs to be predictable.
Because predictability can do something reassurance alone does not always manage to do. It helps a child feel the shape of what is coming next.
And when they know what is coming, they do not have to fight so hard to make sense of it.
A silly song.
A closed door.
A child who knows what comes next.
And, with some luck, a little more sleep for everyone.
