A child's real grievance, done seriously: why must bed come while the sky is still blue and the birds are still hopping about outside? Stevenson never talks down to the complaint, which is exactly why it works read aloud to a small person who has made the same argument themselves.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
About this poem
From A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)
Another one from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), and often the very first poem in the book. It puts words to a complaint every child has felt: in summer you are sent to bed while the sky is still bright and blue, the birds are up, and you can hear people walking past outside. Stevenson spent much of his own childhood ill in bed, so he knew the feeling well.
This is the one to keep for a light summer evening, when going to bed feels plainly unfair. Read it and the child hears that someone understood, more than a century ago. It does not end the argument. It does make the child feel less alone in it, which is often enough to settle them.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition