The nightly battle to get your kid to brush their teeth and get ready for bed can feel like it’s sucking up way too much of your time - and that’s because it is. A new study looked into just how long parents are spending on getting the little ones to go to sleep and it turns out, it’s actually more than most of us get in vacation time at work!
The Firefly toothbrush company asked 1,000 parents of children between three and 12 about the bedtime routine at their homes and found that on average, parents spend almost 18 full work days on it. That’s 140 hours of your life spent begging for teeth to be brushed, faces washed and jammies put on.
We thought it was bad enough trying to wrestle a pull-up on a toddler, but older kids may be tougher to get ready. Parents of five and six-year-olds report spending the most time trying to get them to brush their teeth. But moms and dads with seven- and eight-year-olds report spending the most time overall on their bedtime routine.
The study shows that most kids only brush without being begged four times a week, that’s out of 14 times. So you can see where all that time is going. And we can’t trust them to do it on good faith because 57% of parents say their kids will lie about having brushed. It’s exhausting for sure, but it’s what we all signed up for with this parenting gig. So we just have to grin and bear it.
Source: The Stir