Said It Here

Do you enforce bedtimes at sleepovers?

If you let kids stay up until 1am, you will have to deal with extremely grumpy children the next day. Skipping a forced bedtime also means you lose the only time you and your partner have together to relax and watch your own shows.

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

  1. 1
    Encouraging kids to get ready for bed early
  2. 2
    Containing playing to one room to avoid noise
  3. 3
    Requesting that lights go out after a while while letting them play and chat
  4. 4
    Waiting for the weekends to have time together
  5. 5
    Staying up later into the night after the kids finally fall asleep

In their words

Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.

r/Parenting2 people · September 2026 – October 2026

“8 yr old boy gets GRUMPY AF when he's up too late.”source ↗

“Do you let bedtime go? As long as no one is hurt or whatever, let em go to bed at 1am and later?”source ↗

“Do you tell them it's time to go to bed and enforce that?”source ↗

One-Might-9018 · r/Parenting · 26 upvotes

“How do you parents with similar bedtimes get any time together??”source ↗

“When do you get to watch your trashy reality shows with your partner? Is the answer just "you don't"?”source ↗

auriandfoxen · r/Parenting · 6 upvotes

Where this came up

People with this problem also raised