Larks vs. Owls: How Do You Deal When You and Your Husband (or Kids) Have a Different Internal Clock?
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Here’s a fun question for today: How do you deal when you have a different internal clock than your partner or your kids, i.e., when some of you are larks and some of you are owls? What changes have you made personally to accommodate people, such as going to bed earlier or getting up earlier?
Do you feel like as a “family etiquette” matter, everyone should get up when the earliest kid gets up, or have you negotiated “sleep in” hours with your partner where, for example, one person gets to sleep in on Saturday and the other gets to sleep in on Sunday?
For my $.02: by nature, I am much more of an owl. In my youth, I joked that I would turn full-on nocturnal if not for work and school; there were years there where I thought of a 9:00 a.m. weekend alarm as “early.” Even now, my brother and mother are often up until 2:00 in the morning as a matter of course.
When I met my husband, though, things changed. He is naturally a lark; we joke that as soon as the sun comes up, he has an internal “DING! Time to get up!” alarm go off in his head, and even on weekends, barring other factors, he is up pretty much with first light. Accordingly, he zonks out around 10:00 p.m. most nights.
{related: how to wake up more easily when it’s dark out}
In the early years of marriage, I would try to sleep when he slept, even though I wasn’t terribly tired — ah, young love! — but I still never quite adjusted. When babies came, of course, they had their own crazy little schedules, and any parental sleep, regardless of what time we got it, was appreciated.
As the kids get older, though, I am sorry to report, they are larks like their daddy. I still remember one morning a few years ago — my older son was around 4 or 5 and needed comforting in the middle of the night, then I fell asleep in his bed. When he started to stir in the morning, he woke me up, and I did the “adoring mom watches child sleep” thing for a few minutes. Suddenly, he blinked, looked at the sunlight coming in, and said “go Go GO!!!” and jumped out of bed.
Ah, to bottle that energy — even when I do manage to get up early it’s never quite as easy as just hopping out of bed, although I wish it were. (I’m sad to report that I’m a snoozer.)
So how about you, ladies — does your partner have a different internal clock than you do? Do your kids sleep late — or wake up at the crack of dawn? Is there a “sleeping in” etiquette with you and your partner with regard to the kids, such as one parent gets Saturday to sleep in and one parent gets Sunday?
I’m a fairly extreme lark, compounded by early AM starts throughout my life in school/ sports/ whatever. This complicated partying in college (invariably around 11.30pm you could find me taking a nap on the sofa, stone-cold sober, wherever I happened to be – house party, fraternity, friend’s apartment) but is very useful today for transatlantic client calls. DH has higher sleep needs than I do and is more in the middle of the lark/ owl spectrum. In the baby year, when I am still nursing a baby at night, I let him get uninterrupted sleep and he gets up with the kids in the morning, but once kids sleep through the night, we generally take turns.
It’s been very interesting to observe our kids’ likely patterns – my 4yo is also a lifelong lark (he wakes up super energetic and ready to start the day) and my 10mo is a loller, as in, she will wake up, loll in bed, and babble to herself for 20 minutes before she wants up. They frequently conspire to never, ever sleep in at the same time.
Hah. I’m an owl with high sleep needs, and DH is a lark. One kid is a lark, the other two are owls. Ever since the kids were little DH let me sleep in a little longer on weekends. On weekdays, he leaves for work earlier (but gets home earlier and makes dinner), while I do breakfast (usually in a stupor while my little lark bounces around and my other two are dragging themselves out of bed) and dropoff.
I am sooooo an Owl and it’s maybe a little problematic. First of all, I think generally people give more credit to Larks, like they are better people or not lazy or work harder or are more responsible than Owls. This kind of drives me crazy as I feel like non-Owls have no concept of what it’s like to feel, actually, better at 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. than I do earlier in the day. Anyway, my husband is Lark-ish (he is capable of sleeping in a little bit but is very good at getting up to go-go-go exercise, yard chores, etc. in the morning). My kids are also Lark-ish to medium. I used to go to bed with my husband but now I just don’t . . . I got sick of being in bed with him snoring and me not sleepy and not able to do anything. However, since the world is built for Larks, I don’t get enough sleep–I get about 5-6 hours per night during the week. So I should make myself go to bed earlier, and try to adjust, but then there are lots of things I don’t get done, and that is frustrating.
I am more on the lark end of things and so is my husband. Kiddo was a huuuuuuge lark as a baby, so we’ve basically organized our life around that. It was more difficult when she was a baby and needed more sleep and would start getting hysterically overtired around 5:45 p m… Thank heavens those days are behind us!
The flip side of early to bed is that she has slept later than 8 a.m. only a handful of times in her entire life and has never once slept later than 8:30. She’s usually bright eyed and bushy tailed, thundering through the house, ready to start the day sometime within the 6 a.m. hour. Which means I am too. Even when I’m given the opportunity to sleep in, I rarely sleep past 7.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with this schedule. I think we’ll have a smoother transition to kindergarten than my friends whose young kids have been staying up til 10 pm and sleeping til 9 for the past few years.
My husband and I are both Larks, and our daughter is an Owl. I’m not terribly surprised, my mother and brother are both Owls, but my husband was really thrown for a loop. Its hard now because she’s only 4, and doesn’t want to stop playing at night. Some nights I fall asleep before she does. But she is still small enough for me to physically carry to breakfast in the morning. When she’s older she’ll probably self-manage nights better, but mornings will be a nightmare.
I’m an owl with low to moderate sleep needs, DH is an owl (even more so than me – he could sleep until noon if left undisturbed) with very high sleep needs and our toddler is an owl with low to moderate sleep needs. I have enough flexibility such that I typically get to work around 10 or 10:30 and then stay later, which allows us all to sleep in, as toddler typically goes to bed between 10-11 and gets up from 7-9. It is going to be a rude awakening for all of us when she starts pre-school (and eventually regular school) and she has to be up and at ’em much earlier. This morning I was slammed for work and the housekeepers were coming (and I’ve been working 14 hour days, so lots of pre-cleaning to do), and I was up and showered and downstairs by 8 (very early for me) and toddler and DH were both still snoring at 9:30 (together, because 2 year sleep regression and tired mama mean family co-sleeping after MOTN wakeups).