‘My genius bogeyman plot has spectacularly backfired’

WHAT began as a little white lie on a family holiday has turned into the story of a globetrotting villain intent on enforcing bedtimes. And now there’s a big problem, writes Darren Levin.

GARY is a scary hotel manager who rounds up naughty children like stray animals and puts them into a lockup full of spiders each night.

He’s a mean, but fair man; only preying on kids that have run out of strikes, final ‘last’ chances, star chart stickers, reward coins, screen time privileges, Kinder Surprise tokens, Instagram credits, stevia sweetened candy drops, or whatever else parents use to bribe their kids.

Gary is only summoned when kids do terrible, horrible, heinous, awful things. Like when they jump out of bed and do victory laps around the person playing lullabies through their smartphone on the floor. That person, of course, is me. Each second spent out of bed eats into the 12 minutes of uninterrupted ‘me’ time I usually spend reading books about mindful parenting. And so, in a moment of pure inspiration (or desperation, depending on how you look at it) I invented Gary to scare my kids into going to sleep.

That moment happened two months ago in a Los Angeles hotel when all five of us (two adults, three kids under seven) were holed up in a single room. Our twin four-year-old daughters wouldn’t stay in their beds, and so Gary arrived via a fake knock at the door.

Darren Levin and his three children. (Pic: supplied)

At first, Gary was pretty benign. Just the usual shouty hotel manager stuff, but now he’s morphed into a determined bogeyman that hijacked a plane to follow us all the way back to Australia — a man with a single-minded mission: putting the children of Melbourne to bed.

But recently, during a 12-minute stint of uninterrupted downtime, I started wondering if maybe this Gary character was a bit, well, extreme?

Conjuring a demon is weirdly not on Web MD’s list of 9 Ways to Make a Child’s Bedtime Easy. So I reached out to a real doctor, leading child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, for a free consultation under the guise of an “interview”.

I was surprised to find out that Carr-Gregg considered my unorthodox sleep method pretty tame. Okay, so I may have left out the bits about the jail cell filled with spiders and the plane hijacking and the night terrors (that was, um, a joke), but in principle he agreed that inventing a monster to scare my children to bed didn’t exactly make me a monster. I felt vindicated, and very relieved.

“That’s mild,” he said. “The worst I’ve ever heard was a parent who literally, hand on heart, said: ‘Every time you don’t go to sleep when I tell you to, a fairy princess dies.’ That’s the worst and this was a group of girls — there were four of them, I think — who really loved fairy princesses. That hurt. That was cruel.”

Dr Michael Carr-Gregg says creating a bogeyman to help enforce bedtimes is kinda, sorta okay. (Pic: Jesse Marlow)

Apparently, the reason Dr Carr-Gregg gave me a pass mark has a lot to do with the importance of sleep for tiny bodies and minds. He describes it as “the most important psychological repair mechanism for the brain”, helping kids learn and also grow because you release growth hormones while your sleep. Who knew!

He says we’re currently in the midst of an unprecedented “sleep deprivation pandemic” — largely due to backlit smartphones, or even incandescently lit bathrooms where we hover over our children each night and watch what can be vaguely described as brushing teeth. Which I guess makes old mate Gary a kind of antihero in this sleep deprivation story?

“It is so important that we fight over things that matter,” Carr-Gregg says. “So if you were telling me you were doing something unorthodox so they’d keep their room tidy you wouldn’t get a mark from me at all. Because I don’t care about untidy rooms. This is to do with their wellbeing, so it’s absolutely fine. Not a problem.”

Knowing Dr Carr-Gregg has my back, I’m going to sleep soundly tonight. But there’s another twist to this story that may come back to bite me. You see, Gary — literally the first name to pop into my head that night in the hotel — isn’t just the name of the benevolent bogeyman inhabiting my home. He’s also my wife’s uncle, and he’s coming around to the house in a couple weeks.

But, at least I didn’t kill off any fairy princesses, right?

Darren Levin is a writer, editor and wannabe dad-fluencer based in Melbourne. Find him on Twitter and Instagram.