On her AFR program, Dr. Jessica Peck told her “Dr. Nurse Mama” audience to consider shifting our perspective on how the day ends.
"What if we stop thinking about bedtime simply as the final task of the day?” she asked. “And we started to see it as the golden hour, as a golden opportunity? As the time when you may build more memories with your kids than at any other time?"
Statistics and analysis on families and family time are both positive and negative. Parents are spending more time at home with their children than in decades past, the National Institutes of Health, which looked back to the 1960s, reported.
That positive NIH study was in 2012, however, and the Institute for Family Studies warned parents this year that tablets and smartphones are occupying all our time and attention.
Dr. Peck was joined on her program by Oregon pastor and author Solomon Rexius. A father of four, Rexius shared how a simple nighttime routine of speaking a blessing over his children's lives started as a small personal prayer.
That nightly act blossomed into his book, “A Bedtime Blessing from Head to Toe.”
Rexius told the program he is no “expert” on parenting, but he saw an opportunity, when his first child had turned 1, to use the bedtime routine to pray over him.
That began with a prayer over his son’s eyes -- to see God’s beauty and to see the best in others. From there, he said, the mind came next. “It started with just a few sayings,” he explained, “and then became a full blessing over the entire body.”
Using the Rexius family as an example, Dr. Peck encouraged her audience to “rethink” their family’s nighttime routines before turning off the lights. “You don't want to just crash and burn at the end of the day,” she said. “You really want to have a moment of connection.”
