ABSTRACT
IN the last chapter we tried to show that bedtime for the small child is not merely an incidental episode among the many which punctuate his day, but that it has a special significance as a microcosm of family life, often directly involving every member of the family group and serving the child as a definitive statement of family roles. The image which the family thus presents of and to itself at bedtime is given greater weight by the fact that it tends, for the children at least, to be the terminal one of the day, unblurred by succeeding distractions: the picture with which the child is left as he drowses off to sleep, which he takes with him into this final unavoidable separation — and which, presumably, therefore achieves maximum retention. It is evident, from their attempts to make the bedtime experience pleasurable, that mothers recognize its significance to the child: as one woman put it, ‘a child should never go to sleep crying and never go to school crying’.
