As many parents will know, trying to get your children to sleep at night can be a stressful experience. It's all very well for the experts to advise having strict rules about bed-time, accompanied by soothing, repetitive rituals conducive to sleep. But the pressures of modern living sometimes get in the way of the theory.
And besides, like certain flammable materials, some children seem to burn brightest just before they go out.
For me, the classic bedtime routine - the role model to which, as a parent, I still pathetically aspire - was the one portrayed in the 1970s US television series The Waltons.
You may recall that each episode of The Waltons ended with the family calmly reviewing the day's events. As darkness fell on Walton's Mountain, we would see an external view of the homestead, accompanied by a philosophical voice-over from the narrator, and a short but always good-humoured exchange of words between family members. Despite enduring the poverty of 1930s Virginia - including bedroom walls so thin that they could always talk to each other without raising their voices - the Waltons invariably went to bed happy.
The conversation might be between Jim-Bob and Elizabeth, or between John-Boy and Mary Ellen. Sometimes it would be a three-way exchange, or occasionally an all-in family conference.
Always it would touch lightly on the theme of the episode just passed, which typically concerned the visit of a stranger to the neighbourhood. Sometimes it was a whole group of strangers, such as a troupe of carnival folk left stranded by their unscrupulous impresario after a show the Waltons couldn't afford to see. The family would have rescued the troupe, and had their kindness repaid by an impromptu performance that offered a glimpse of "the world beyond Walton's Mountain".
Before they left, the actors would have given John-Boy a book (probably Moby-Dick) that he would treasure for the rest of his life. In the voice-over, the now middle-aged John-Boy would find a moral in the episode that had helped him become a writer.
Frequently he would work in a grateful mention of his "remarkable parents" who, poor as they were, had raised their kids well. The light in the 17-year-old John-Boy's window would always be the last to go out as the credits rolled.
Of course the tragedy for many modern-day parents is that they don't live at the foot of a mountain named after them in depression-era Virginia. More likely they inhabit suburban housing estates, where their children are not tired out by fresh air and great adventures, like the episode in which the Walton kids had to buy their calf back from Mr Anderson to save it being slaughtered. Or the one where a small meteorite crashed through the roof of the Baldwin sisters' shack.
Yes, we have adventures in suburban life too. Maybe it took us two hours to get home from work this evening instead of the usual hour-and-a-half, because the traffic was dreadful. Maybe we lost the TV remote control and it turned up later, with no apparent explanation, in the dishwasher. But these are not the sorts of thing your children will recall with affection in 30 years' time, for the purposes of a philosophical voice-over.
In a modern-day Waltons' bed-time scene, Jim-Bob would be chasing Mary-Ellen around the living room with his light sabre, while Mary-Ellen did an impression of Janet Leigh in the shower scene from Psycho. Their mother would be shouting at both of them to, for God's sake, put their pyjamas on. Then Jim-Bob would start jumping on the sofa, raising dust and feathers and causing Elizabeth to have an asthma attack.
Meanwhile the baby, who had only just been rocked to sleep, finally, because he's teething and crankier than a bag of cats, would have been woken up again by the racket and started bawling anew. Their father would be loudly grumbling that he should have gone to the pub to watch this really important football match. And John-Boy would be wondering how the hell anyone was supposed to be a budding writer in this madhouse.
When the chaos subsided, and the family finally retired to bed, tension would linger. Any inter-room conversations would be likely to involve raised voices. "GO TO SLEEP!" "BUT I'M HUNGRY!" "OF COURSE YOU'RE HUNGRY - YOU WOULDN'T EAT YOUR DINNER!" Sometimes, the exchanges might be more robust - "IF I HEAR ANY MORE BOUNCING ON THE BED I'M GOING TO COME IN THERE NOW AND . . ." - requiring urgent rewriting by the Waltons script editor. Nobody would be in the humour for philosophy.
The only moral a parent might draw from the day's events would be that in the absence of the mountain he so carelessly failed to have behind the house, he could at least have secured a 200-foot garden for the kids to wear themselves out in. When sleep finally descended on the homestead, it would be less like the old Waltons and more like a surprise ending of the Sopranos.