Forget about Starr vs. Clinton. Forget about Yankees and Padres (That is easy enough). If you want to see two sworn enemies fighting it out, just check in on parent vs. child any night of the week at bedtime.

Getting a child to go sleep is the Battle Royal of parent/child struggles. Whether in Peachtree City or Prague, the age-old war of putting baby to bed lives on. Call me Henry Kissinger, here are my tips to make this conflict a little less... uh... conflicting.

Children are about illogical resistance. The same child that resists bath water also resists all attempts to remove her from swimming pool water. A child will resist eating anything that is green and healthy. Yet, he resists all attempts to pry from his stubby little hands, anything that is green and unhealthy, a lollipop or a 9-day-old piece of ham found under the couch, for instance. Thus, it should be expected that children would resist sleep.

To find success in putting a child to sleep, first you have to know what not to do. Don't feed them anything that is round or let them drink out of anything that is square. Round signifies sugar, salt, preservatives, and a general non-concern by food companies for child hyperactivity. Doughnuts, cookies, crackers and snack cakes will pretty much assure a full night of story telling combined with trampoline-style bed jumping.

The juice box or, as it is known in France, "Le Petit Frenzy," is pretty much kiddie cocaine and should be avoided at all costs within 12 hours of sleep time. The only way a child could have his blood sugar raised faster is through an intravenous glucose. Maybe that's why juice box straws so much resemble an I.V. needle.

A few other "don'ts" include no scary movies, no kid videos and no mention of the next day's activities. Once a child is actually in the bed, you should never play "what does that shadow look like" with her. Though you might be proud of your creativity-inducing ad lib, your child will pretty much only see monsters that she never noticed before until you brought it up. Thanks, dad.

The well-prepared parent needs to take their child to bed with at least the following items: Diapers, wipes, cup of water, child's favorite toy, child's favorite book and the day's object of fixation. Luckily my daughter's current favorite is rubbing my ear lobes. She drifts softly to sleep as I teeter ever closer to blistering, bruising and bleeding.

A misconception about putting kids to bed is that you can have success by avoiding liquids to keep potty breaks or diaper changes to a minimum. This does not work. Somewhere in an appendix to Einstein's postulates on the "speed of light," there is a side note concerning a correlation to the speed of darkness falling on a room and the need for a child to use the bathroom as soon as the light switch is turned off.

Another misconception is that you can "get all that energy out" by somehow making a child tired. You would have more success burning up the energy contained in the sun. The more you run a child, the more they want to run. The odds of "running down" your child are about the same as finding a truck driver in the home interior section of a Barnes and Noble.

Putting a child to sleep is a noble effort for every parent, and deep down I think we are jealous of our little tykes and tots. Wouldn't it be grand as an adult to not want to sleep? Therein lies a most dissimilar element concerning child and adult. Adults spend much time craving sleep but, even in bed, just can't seem to find it. Children spend much time avoiding sleep but, when head finally hits the pillow, seem to find it most easily.