Parental Control: A Guide for Children. (Chapter 1.)

Welcome to a new series aimed at children, by guest blogger Uma S. Lavé. Uma is Director of the N.A.P. Institute, and consultant to the current Effective Tantrums study at Princess-Fairy-Land University. This series looks at the all important subject of keeping the balance of power in you child/parent relationship.

Chapter One: Sleep

An exhausted parent is a weak parent; a parent easily broken by demands. There are two simple methods of control through sleep.

The first is the consistent disturbance method, whereupon you wake at the exact same time every night, without fail. It will only take a few weeks to see a dramatic reduction of resilience in your parent. They are guaranteed to begin doubting their own sanity, when they wake to your frantic calls and the clock once again sits at 2:47am. 

The second method is the random disturbance method. Here takes a little more effort on your part, usually requiring more than one wake-up during the night. Your sleep pattern must differ as much as possible from the night before. This will leave your parents confused and disorientated. Here you may “sleep through” for one, sometimes even two nights, but the following night will be a busy one for you, as it requires at least four frenzied wake-ups.

If you feel confident with the two above methods, you may attempt this last ‘icing on the cake’ as it were. It requires at least two siblings: One, the wakeful younger child, and two, the older child who has graduated from night time control to the more sophisticated daytime methods outlined in future chapters.

I must stress that a strict roster is vital for the following method. The younger child will have been using one of the above methods until the parents seem nearly at breaking point. Then one night, he or she will sleep like never before. Twelve straight blissful hours. This particular night, older child, it is your night to shine. You may have slept through every night for months on end, but tonight... Tonight my child you wake. And you scream. And whimper that you need to sleep with mummy. At any attempt to return you to your own bed, or indeed use any form of what parents call ‘reasoning’, you scream. The terror that you’ll wake your younger, usually wakeful, sibling will have your parent stumbling back to their warm bed with you in their arms. Blissful as this may seem, your work is not done. You must kick and thrash out at the first sign of either of them slipping back to sleep. A combination of a well placed jab of the foot, and the fear that the younger sibling will be waking at any time, will make them putty in your little hands by morning.

And here I leave you, my sweet children, until our next chapter.

Goodnight, and good luck!

Uma S. Lavé.