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Time for Bed! Children’s Bedtime Practices, Routines and Affects

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Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth

Abstract

On average, a third of every person’s life is spent ‘asleep’.1 Moreover, we each spend considerable periods of time, be it ‘awake’, or ‘awake-ish’, concerned with issues, practices, routines and spaces related to sleep. Whether furnishing a bedroom, attempting to achieve the right ambient bedroom temperature, finding that position where we habitually find slumber or waking from a nightmare, sleeping is an important and — as our opening quotation reminds us — active, embodied preoccupation.

Sleep tends to be considered as a time of quiescence and tranquillity, a time when the body and the mind relax … a time when relatively little happens. These assumptions are partly incorrect since sleep is, in fact, an active process.

(Sloan and Shapiro 1997: 7)

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© 2010 John Horton and Peter Kraftl

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Horton, J., Kraftl, P. (2010). Time for Bed! Children’s Bedtime Practices, Routines and Affects. In: Hörschelmann, K., Colls, R. (eds) Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230274747_16

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