Our boy thought sleeping in his clothes would be a genius life hack

“Wouldn’t that make you sick?” his mum asks. No, he assures us, this is a magic meal that would simply nourish you for seven days without the gastric damage that a single 20,000-calorie meal might otherwise entail.

“Wouldn’t you miss eating, though?” I ask. “No,” he tells us, “and you’d have a lot more time on your hands. Mummy could watch more movies,” he says. “And you…” – he pauses trying to think of something I enjoy doing – “would probably sleep.” I glance past the idea that my son believes I only get up each morning to facilitate my need to eat throughout the day, mostly because it has a ring of truth to it I’d rather not address.

“I don’t like wasting time,” he asserts, “which is why I should be allowed to wear my school uniform to bed.”

At this, we groan since he has spent the past few weeks avidly begging to sleep in his school clothes. This is not unique to him. It is, in fact, so common a request that a search of any parenting forum will deliver hundreds of queries from quizzical mums and dads asking how to deal with their child’s constant entreaties to go to bed fully enclothed so as to avoid the deadening rigmarole of getting dressed each morning. My son has demanded it so frequently that, in a Proustian rush of childlike regress, I’ve recalled that I, too, was similarly keen on the idea when I was his age. In my case, this was primarily because I wanted to spend more time in bed, but I do not tell him this, since it will only feed his growing sense of me as a figure of perfect human sloth.

Online, dozens of people tell me that they, too, had been obsessed with the concept as children. Some, like me, for more time in bed, others to avoid the discomfort of dressing on chilly winter mornings. One spoke of a classmate who slept in their shoes, while another said they only developed a taste for the practice in their early 20s.

My friend Dave tells me that he did it religiously, himself, with the added subterfuge of wearing his pyjamas on top of the clandestine uniform, to avoid detection. He was eventually rumbled, he tells me via text, “when my ma woke me up and realised I had on a vest, a shirt buttoned up to the top, a tie and a woolly jumper, all under my pyjama top. I must have stank.”

The general consensus is that the practice is confounding, but harmless and, more importantly, that most kids will stop asking for it the minute they try it once or twice. I return with these findings to my wife and she is appalled by the idea. She is even less convinced when I compare it to sitcom dads making their kids smoke a whole pack of cigarettes to teach them a lesson. “That’s not a good thing to do,” she says, and I am forced to admit she’s right. She also detects within it a slight whiff of self-interest on my part. I reassure her that, yes, I will be writing about it, but it’s also teaching him a valuable lesson about getting what you want. She issues a reluctant, consenting “harrumph” – the first I’ve ever heard in real life – and I give my son the good news.

He buffers with delight, not quite sure what he’s done to deserve this. “But no shoes!” I say, as he dances a jig in the sitting room. An hour later, I discover the first benefit of my plan. There’s no bellyaching over bedtime, nor demands for one last game of Mario Kart. He bounds up the stairs, filled with perverse glee at the promise of elicit sleepwear.

The first drawback is ascending the steps to his top bunk. He’s only ever done this in loose-fitting pyjamas and finds his trousers restrictive. Without even thinking, he slides them off and sidles into bed, trouserless, and begins reading his night-time book.

When I come in to switch off his light half an hour later, he’s fast asleep, having discarded the jumper at the foot of his bed, likely due to the overheating that’s speckled his brow with a thin film of sweat. In the morning, he bounds into our room wearing nothing but his underpants and a school shirt that is so comically bedraggled he looks like “1970s chat-show appearance” Oliver Reed. The collar is crumpled – one end is sticking up, the other wilted entirely. We tell him he can’t go to school wearing that and he admits he’d like to change it. “I’m a bit sweaty,” he says.

“Did you learn anything from this experience?” I ask him, smugly turning to my wife so she can take in the life lesson I’ve just provided. He ponders the question for a moment.

“Um,” he says, squinting at us in deep thought, “Mummy would never have let me do this, and she’s probably right.”

Photograph by Getty Images