I would like to be sympathetic to this, because it is true that as a child I was free to do what I pleased at "bedtime" the rule being that I may not leave my r

I would like to be sympathetic to this, because it is true that as a child I was free to do what I pleased at "bedtime" the rule being that I may not leave my room or disturb my parents, so e.g. reading until daylight is fine, playing music is not, but whether I'm "in bed" let alone "asleep" is on me. In fact of course almost always I would end up asleep, maybe not exactly when I "should" be asleep, but likely as soon as you'd end up getting a reluctant child to actually sleep if you're trying to enforce that. However, we know lots of children left to their own devices get over-tired, they should sleep but they don't and then they're much worse for it the next day. So in practice most parents are doing the right thing by insisting that children should sleep when they were "supposed" to rather than leaving them to their own devices as mine did. I have a friend who is an angry drunk. The sort of person who door staff may need to kick out of a bar before they start a fight. In his 20s and 30s, loud arguments about nothing of consequence and even occasional violence were a likely end to a previously enjoyable evening. But although he's still an angry drunk he eventually got good enough at understanding his own emotional state that by his 40s he would just leave. Instead of "We need to all go home or J might kick off" it's "Bye J, see you next week" because he's just realised he feels angry about nothing and he has ordered himself a ride home and is leaving, no fuss. This ability to self-regulate is often not something children are good at, but it's important. There's a difference between reasoning that if you eat the whole cake you'll feel bad and not eating the whole cake because you'll feel bad