We did the same with mealtimes. We used to fight over “you have to eat now” or “finish everything on your plate.” Total chaos, power struggles, tears (sometimes ours too). One day, we just dropped the whole script. Now we offer food regularly, but whether they eat or not is totally up to them. Shockingly, they don’t starve, and mealtime is actually peaceful.

Sometimes the battle does more damage than the thing you're trying to enforce. Fiat bedtime, fiat mealtime… maybe a lot of parenting is just figuring out which battles were invented by someone else.