Coronavirus and lockdown life has been a tale of two halves when it comes to my teenage sons. One embraced the new routine and whilst bed times and wake ups were both later than on a school day, he still made the most of every day. The other took self isolation to a whole new level, loving the excuse to stay in his bedroom and shunning the world until he was hungry or needed something washing.
But the new routine has played havoc with his body clock. For him, normal routine is now sleeping during the day and staying awake through the night.
We know this is bad for him and we have tried everything to try and snap him back into a normal routine. But it is hard with a teenager. He is nearly 15, his friends all seem to be nocturnal too. He isn’t on his Xbox in the middle of the night on his own. I wish he was, I often wake up to the sound of him laughing or chatting into his headset as though it is the middle of the day and perfectly normal behaviour.
We have tried sanctions. That failed miserably. We tried waking him up with breakfast in bed every morning. He would eat it and then go back to sleep. We have tried being really, really noisy. He can sleep through anything it seems, even the hoover outside his bedroom door. We have tried reasoning with him. He makes all the right noises and he knows that it isn’t good for him. But there is not school, there isn’t much to do, life isn’t really sure exciting at the moment and he gets frustrated as many of his friends don’t go online until 11pm every night. This would be the time we are telling him to come off.
I feel bad as I know I should be able to get him back to a civilised routine but it has been so long now since he had to get up and go to school that it is a hard habit to break. I also understand that he wants to be online with his friends, but where do you draw the line?
What I don’t like is that he often comes off far too willingly at midnight when we tell him to go to sleep and then sneaks back on once he knows we are all in bed. That is dishonest and if he wakes us up, he certainly does’t stay on for long. But of course, he is wide awake having spent most of the daylight hours asleep.
We are trying to encourage him to get up and do some things, he came to Wales with us to see family last week but slept a lot in the car. We all went our for lunch today which was a nice treat, an hour later, we found him crashed out on his bed fast asleep.
If by some miracle he is back in school in September, we are in for some fun times trying to get him back into a normal routine. I just hope that school does resume as normal otherwise, I don’t think there is any hope of breaking his new nocturnal normal.
Have you tried taking his xbox away on a night time. hehehe I take my teen’s controllers away if she is looking like she might be staying up too late.
Good luck with getting him back into a routine. I think it’s going to be a struggle for us all x
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You will probably find it will be ok because at the moment “they” are all up doing it. I know our 17 year old will start weaning himself back into a more normal pattern closer to going back to school and so will his peers. Hopefully your son will just do the same when everyone else is.
But yes it is the noise and they are worse with no headsets. We have all games consoles in the living room and no wall separating downstairs and up (by the staircase) so the voices travel – worse still with headsets on.
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Eek! That does sound very challenging. But I know how hard it is to change a teenager’s behaviour and get them to do things they don’t want to do.
We saw friends at the weekend, and their 16 year old was exactly the same. He got out of bed grudgingly to see us, but then had to go back in the afternoon as he was so tired.
My eldest was getting up at 1pm while he was on furlough, which was bad enough. My daughter tends to get up about 9.30 and my younger son was getting up around 10, although he has suddenly started getting up before 9! He does play games, but most of them don’t involve talking to other people. He says he feels better if he goes to bed before 12, so he’s made the decision himself to do that.
Good luck with the return to school!
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