Winding down when nobody can — the bedtime hour

The short version

If bedtime is the part of the day you most dread, here's the short version before anything else:

• Bedtime is the last hard stretch of the day, run on the emptiest tank — for both of you. You're not short on love or effort. You're short on fuel, at the exact hour the job gets biggest.
• "Overtired but wound up" is real, and it isn't defiance. When a child gets a second wind right when they should be running out of steam, their body clock is still saying stay awake — and a wound-up body can't just flip to sleep because the clock says so.
• The thing that helps most isn't more willpower. It's a smaller, same-every-night routine that runs itself, so nobody has to decide anything in the moment. It settles them — and it gives you a little back, too.

That's the whole module. The rest is the why, and the how. (And if bedtime feels like a nightly disaster — it almost always looks worse from the inside than it actually is.)