Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption New year and knackered? Please, please go to sleep …
Exhausted after Christmas and the new year? Are you craving a few more hours in bed? Are you a parent whose sleepless children are leaving you a sleep-starved wreck?
These days in early January are claimed as the darkest days for sleep deprivation.
The modern barometer for such moments – the number of Google searches – depicts “child won’t sleep” as reaching a worldwide peak of searches at this time of year.
You can just imagine those weary fingers tapping out the words, slumped over a mobile phone in the middle of the night, hoping for an answer.
New year zombies
Children are more wired than Maplin’s shop window. They’ve been living on late nights, red-eyed computer games and party food and the chances of falling asleep are pretty much zero.
Then they have to go back to school, like zombies heading into the mid-winter gloom.
Adults as well as children are suffering. Early January is also the peak day for searches for “sleep” and the more plaintive “I need sleep”.
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption Bad jumpers, even worse sleep. Christmas has all the ingredients for leaving you exhausted.
But desperate days require desperate measures. And mothers, struggling with their children’s lack of sleep, develop their own emergency tactics.
Research for sleep apps, Moshi Twilight Sleep Stories and calm.com, recently identified some of the most eccentric ideas.
They are all claimed as having been tried somewhere. Although you can only imagine how bad things must have become.
And none of them are likely to appear in those unbearably smug parenting books for the perfect family.
13 weird ways to get children to fall asleep
Explaining to your child the infrastructure plans of China’s leader, Xi Jinping
Play a recording of a chapter from an 18 th Century Scottish economics book, read by a really boring teacher
Watch a video of a crossword puzzle tournament
Listen to an hour-long recording of people yawning
Running a vacuum cleaner
Watch a slow-motion film about sheep grazing
Inventing an imaginary figure, like “The 8 o’clock man”, who catches any children still awake after 8p m
Lying the child on the parent’s chest, and the mother slowly spinning in a circle
Putting them in the car and driving
Humming the national anthem
Turning the child’s bed the other way round
Putting a ticking clock under the child’s pillow, to mimic the mother’s heartbeat
Putting an item of garment that smells of the mother in the child’s bed
Image caption Wide awake and ready for another day at work. Who are you kidding?
Image caption The festive season can leave people exhausted and out of routine