10 Belligerent Songs That Will Scare Children into Leaving You Alone

In Swann's Way, Marcel Proust spends roughly 5,000 words grousing about how calamitous insomnia can be. One can only imagine how much more monstrously prodigious and exhausting this rant would have been had the French novelist ever procreated.

There's nothing more vexing for a parent than a child who won't sleep. Adolescent sleeplessness can turn the most level-headed mom or dad into a complete aggro lunatic. I know; I've reached that point with my own little insomniacs.

Months of active bedtime resistance have left me desperate. I've heard of Old World grandmothers pacifying unruly babies with a few drops of the hard stuff, but I ultimately decided against such a course of action because I couldn't figure out if mine were single malt or blended malt kind of kids.

Getting my teeth cleaned recently, I blurted out to the dentist, "So if I wanted to borrow the ol' sleeping gas machine -- just for a week or so--how would I arrange that with you?" I've resorted to preposterous threats: I showed the kids James Mollison's engrossing book Where Children Sleep, which depicts adolescent bedrooms from around the world, and said, "See that poor kid in China who sleeps on a wafer-thin pallet on a dungy floor underneath a poster of Mao Zedong? That's what I'm going to turn your bedroom into if you don't hit the rack right now." I've even taken to reading them Proust at bedtime. Maybe I just need Samuel L. Jackson to pop by.

A number of major studies have shown that children get about an hour less sleep each night than they did three decades years ago. Earlier this year, Pediatrics published a study by University of Chicago investigators that said children who sleep less than their peers are four times more likely to have issues with obesity. Many sleep scientists also believe this lost hour can have a significant impact on a child's developing brain.

"We have an incendiary situation today," goes a recent quote from Dr. Matthew Walker, a professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of California Berkeley, "where the intensity of learning that kids are going through is so much greater, yet the amount of sleep they get to process that learning is so much less. If these linear trends continue, the rubber band will soon snap."

Yeah, either that or us parents.

Anyway, as I sat in my home office one night, plowing through a freelance assignment but having the creative process repeatedly dragged to a screeching halt because my kids are leaving their beds to inform me that they needed a glass of water, extra blankets, a twelfth kiss goodnight, the thermostat set to 71.3 degrees, two air purifiers, and rose petals scattered across their pillows, I thought I had stumbled upon a remedy. I cobbled together a playlist of soothing and somnolent music, songs that can provide the right environment to promote sleep -- Flying Saucer Attack's "Come and Close My Eyes"; Library Tapes' "And the Rain Did Fall; selections from Robert Rich's Drones and Trances, Loscil's Endless Falls, Japancakes' remake of Loveless, and Wendy Carlos' Sonic Seasonings; a little bit of Nicolas Jarr, recently praised at Pitchfork for making great putting-your-daughter-to-sleep music -- but then decided to turn the whole endeavor on its head.