Are Beds a Tool of the Devil?
By Joe Barker
“What?!” I snap in response to a polite good morning. I'm doing my best to hide it, but my wife may have spotted that I'm a little surly at breakfast this morning. I've had the kind of night that makes me question why we ever go on holiday and leave the security of our familiar beds and bedtime routines. In fact, I’ve had the particular kind of night that has me questioning whether beds and bedtime as a whole might be a devilish creation designed to test humankind. Certainly, full of the very sourest of the milk of human kindness, I can think only of bad bedtime experiences. Let's take last night as an example.
Fun and games
It's 3am and I'm questioning my life choices while thinking longingly of my warm, comfortable bed. In what I can only assume was an act of premeditated mischief, Marty had a bad dream and woke Alice up with his screaming. Although he is now asleep, I'm left kneeling by Alice's travel crib trying to soothe her to sleep. A few moments ago, I thought I'd succeeded, but alas, the click of the hotel door brought her to furious wakefulness.
Desperate to avoid waking Marty with her cries, I rushed back to her side. Now it feels like I'm playing a gentle, but extremely frustrating, game of whack-a-mole. Every time I think she's drifted off, she pops her giggling head back over the side of the crib and drops her teddy on my head. I then tenderly lie her down and watch hopefully as she snuggles into her mattress. Just as I dare to think about shutting my eyes, I get a bear to the face and see Alice grinning down at me. It's very cute but I'm not really enjoying it.
After an hour or so Alice tires of this game and starts making determined efforts to climb out of her crib. As her demands get noisier I give in and lift her out. She promptly curls up on the floor but seems more interested in wriggling and climbing on me than in sleeping. By 5am she's finally exhausted the fun of the hotel floor and decides to sleep. Now, at last, I can close my eyes and try to find a comfortable spot on the concrete floor. My eyelids start to droop, but mere seconds later, Marty wakes up, and by the time I've taken him to play with Mummy, Alice is sitting up and asking about breakfast. What, I loudly demand of a disinterested world, is the point of a hotel bed if I don't get to use it, or a travel crib that Alice prefers to climb out of than sleep in?
Half-size Houdinis
Alice is not the first of our offspring to display a penchant for climbing out of their bed. As a two-year-old, Marty seemed determined to escape from his crib. Of course, we assumed that cribs were designed to contain two-year-olds and that his attempts to escape would prove futile. Nonetheless, once his first screams told us he was awake and trying to lever himself over the bars, we would race to his room to lift him out before he did it for us. Nothing has ever gotten me out of bed faster than knowing that if I didn't hurry, Marty was going to try to hurl himself headfirst onto a hard wooden floor.
One day we were slightly too slow and a slightly stunned looking Marty was found sitting beside his crib. Suddenly the race had real consequences, and even the slightest of sounds would have me running to Marty's room, ready to catch our aspiring escapee. Once again, beds were tormenting us.
Bad bed buys
Sleep deprived and panicking, we decided to buy Marty a bed, preferably before he fell out of his crib again. With speed rather than careful consideration as our main motivation, we made what may be the worst purchase of our parenting journey: a five-foot children's bed. We reasoned that he was too young for an adult bed, and that instead he needed something with a side bar so that he couldn't roll out, while also being low to the floor so that when he did roll out, he wouldn't hurt himself. While we waited for IKEA to deliver our new bed, collect the screwless flatpack they sent us, and finally deliver a bed with all the right components, Marty slept on a mattress on the floor.
The night I proudly showed Marty the bed I'd lovingly put together for him, he screamed and screamed and screamed—and not with joy. We hurriedly dragged his mattress back in and he slept happily on the floor. After a few days, he stopped screaming at the sight of the bed and he'd even let us tuck him into it, but as soon as we left the room he'd crawl back to his mattress and sleep there.
In four months, the only person to spend a night in that bed was me. A sick Marty needed constant hugs and soothing, so while he tossed and turned feverishly across his oh-so-comfortable adult mattress, I tried to squeeze six feet of daddy into five feet of child's bed. An agonising and futile endeavor. Alice will not be getting a children's bed—when she starts hurling herself out of her crib we'll give her a nice safe, cheap, mattress on the floor.
I think these simple examples demonstrate just how fiendishly beds can torment poor parents, but in the interests of fairness, I must consider the good side of beds.
Beds, beautiful beds
At the end of another long day of parenting I yearn for my bed and can think only kindly of beds and their comforts, but to truly appreciate the joys of a good bed we need to see it through the eyes of a child. Where we see sheets, pillows, and glorious sleep, they see a world of adventure.
For Alice, the side of a bed is as daunting as any mountain, and try as she might, she simply cannot scale its imposing heights, so she pleads to be helped onto this forbidden playground. Once there, she throws herself on the pillows with ecstatic glee, and rolls giggling in the duvet. Then it is time to run: backwards and forwards, around and around, on this thrillingly bouncy surface, while daddy leaps desperately from side to side ready to catch her when she misjudges a step and falls off the bed. Finally, there is pushing and throwing as a joyful Alice is ever-so-gently hurled in breathless excitement onto the piled cushions and covers.
Marty, of course, loved these same games as a toddler, but as a stately four-year-old such things are beneath him. Instead, he bounces for himself on and off our bed, testing the springs and floorboards to what we fear will be the point of destruction. No gentle throwing for him; he demands to be violently flung onto the bed in a windmill of flailing limbs. “Again, again!” he yells in hysterical delight.
This is not all that a bed has to offer: it can instantly become a pirate ship, a flying bus, or a sanctuary in a sea of lava. Then in a flash, it is dismantled and becomes a den, where we hide from the Dread Wardrobeosauraus, the most fearsome of all the bedroom dinosaurs.
A final judgment
Undoubtedly beds can be a source of great joy, but does that joy outweigh the misery and suffering that beds and bedtimes can bring to parents? Or perhaps the issue here is the children rather than the beds. Am I unfairly blaming innocent beds for the fiendish nature of my children? Then again, are not those children themselves the result of a moment of bed-based madness? Is that the final proof of beds' devilish design or would that be taking my argument that beds are evil too far? I'll leave you to decide…
About the Author
Joe and his wife Diane moved to Thailand in 2018. Since the arrival of their son Martin in 2021 and daughter Alice in 2024, Joe has been a stay-at-home father. The whole family enjoys BAMBI playgroups and Thai beach holidays. Find Joe on SubStack: BangkokDad bangkokdad.substack.com/