If there’s one thing I say to my children more than any other, it’s asking them – sometimes with my hands clasped together in desperate prayer – to “dial it down”.
They’re small and very excitable. They’re usually so keen to tell me something that they’ll interrupt whatever else is going on and jump up and down, both shouting at once. And while it’s fun, it can also be utterly exhausting. Most days, I want nothing more than five minutes of peace and quiet.
Thankfully, I now have one more trick to add to my parenting arsenal to help me achieve that dream – thanks to mum Jessica D’Entremont.
She came up with a genius way to distract her kids and posted it on Facebook, where it’s been shared more than 115,000 times. And the best thing is: all you need are a couple of pairs of glow-in-the-dark pyjamas.
D’Entremont, from Poughkeepsie, New York, wrote: “Looking for a way to keep your kids still? Buy them glow-in-the-dark PJs. Tell them they have to lie really still under the light to ‘charge’ them. I’m not even sorry.”
The mum added that to “expand on the trickery”, she started putting her daughters’ pyjamas back into their drawer when they get dressed in the morning.
“Unexposed to light all day, they dim and do not glow in the dark,” she said. “They tried to test me last night, until they laid down again.” As D’Entremont said, this reinforces the need to lie quietly under the light before bed.
The mum said both her daughters have sensory processing difficulties – so finding downtime is crucial for their family. Explaining how it affects their day-to-day lives, she tells HuffPost UK: “They need increased stimulation to function. So we have to incorporate that – things like jumping, swinging, spinning.
“The biggest thing is sensory meltdowns. To the untrained eye it looks like the most horrific tantrum you’ve ever seen – kids can make so much noise and physically hurt themselves.
“So we also have to be careful when we see it’s too much, to have a plan for decreased stimuli for them – a tent or quiet, dim place. It’s all about knowing and watching and reading your child.”
Thank goodness it’s Halloween soon. Glow-in-the-dark pyjamas are everywhere – but hurry. We’re betting that as soon as parents cotton on to this simple trick, demand will be sky-high.