How an Amish Mother Keeps Six Children Calm With No Screens — The Evening Rule We Never Break

How an Amish Mother Keeps Six Children Calm With No Screens — The Evening Rule We Never Break For nothing but the hour after supper and a twelve dollar lamp, my six children came down to sleep with no screens, no shouting, and no bedtime war — and in more than thirty years of evenings I can count the bedtimes that ended in tears on one hand. If you have been searching for how to get kids to sleep without screens, or how to calm an overtired child at night, sit with me a minute. My name is Mammi Sarah. I am Amish, and I raised six children in my mother's farmhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with no television and no tablet in the house. This rule came from my mother, and her mother before her. You cannot order a child to feel calm, or bribe it, or switch it on at eight o'clock sharp. Calm is something a child catches from the room around her, and the glowing screen you hand her to settle her down is quietly telling her body the day has started over. The companies that make those screens are paid by the minute your child stays awake. I'll show you the evening rule piece by piece, what little it costs, and the honest truth almost no one is paid to tell you: your child is not failing to settle. Your child is losing a fight against a machine built to win it. I will not pretend a lamp fixes everything. The first three nights can be ugly, this ends the war and not every tear, and a child who fights sleep for months belongs at the doctor, not the button jar. It is free of expense. It is not free of sacrifice, because it costs you your own evening too. Tell me in the comments how many children are under your roof, and what half past seven looks like at your house tonight, the honest version and not the Sunday one. I read every one. Subscribe for more of the old ways — next time, how I get six children to eat what is set in front of them without one word of fuss, with a wooden spoon and one row of the garden. 🔔