In our Sleeping With… series, we ask people from different career paths, backgrounds, and stages of life how they make sleep magic happen.
Pink’s influence already spans decades of pop music. The three-time Grammy Award–winning artist (with a total of 20 nominations) has earned accolades like Billboard’s Woman of the Year Award in 2013 and Broadcast Music, Inc’s President’s Award in 2015. She’s had four singles reach number one on the Billboard Top 100 Chart, with 15 singles total in the top 10. And at 41, while Pink is still performing acrobatics in front of sold out arena audiences, life on the road looks a little different than it did in the early aughts: The star shares children Willow, 10, and Jameson, 5, with her husband of 19 years, motocross racer Carey Hart.
“When we go away on a trip with friends, they actually can’t believe our bedtime routine because it involves lots of noise, chaos, and wrestling on the bed,” Pink tells SELF. “But somehow it works for us.” While the singer is a self-admitted night owl (“I can party with the best of them,” she says) the wind down rituals she’s created for both herself and her family act as a necessary glue.
Today, Pink announced a new partnership with Calm, where she will be releasing three Calm Kids Sleep Stories all in the name of teaching children about rest, self care, and mental health from a young age. “I’ve been listening to Calm stories myself for years,” she says. “My kids, though, have recently been listening to Calm stories, which is why I wanted to be a part of this in the first place.” The singer has long been an advocate for mental health, candid about how she navigates the more difficult parts of life as both a parent and partner. “My job—if you want to call it that—is beautiful because it allows me to write about what hurts, write about what I’m trying to alchemize, and then go on stage and fully exercise my demons with 80,000 people that have the same demons, that have the same thing to release, and maybe don’t have the same opportunities that I have to access those feelings,” she says.
Here, Pink gives SELF a glimpse into what bedtime looks like while her family’s on tour, the mental health lessons she’s teaching her daughter, and the products she’s currently using for her ever-evolving hair.
I always take my kids on tour with me. I tried to get them into a stuffed animal or a blanky because I had a blanky. But I actually am their blanket, I’ve learned.
Codependency is a huge topic in this house. [Laughs.] But actually—our rituals on the road are so important. The kids have their own dressing room everywhere we go. The joke on our most recent tour is: Tour life used to be whiskey and donuts, and now it’s a ball pit and a trampoline and oat milk. But it’s really sweet.
Carey does bath time when I’m on stage, and I do it on the nights off.
Jameson was a baby baby on the last tour. So he would have his bottle and he would get in his pack and play and Willow would be in bed. It’s very, very sweet when you have littles. I keep thinking about the future when they’re teenagers, because my daughter’s a very mature 10-year-old, and I’m like, wow, this “being needed” is about to change. Already on tour she’ll be in wardrobe, ignoring me.
We brush our teeth, we cuddle, we sometimes read a story.
For my daughter, it’s her time to unpack the day, so I just kind of sit and wait. I’ve realized that if I ask questions, there will be no answers. But if I just sit, I get information. Then we listen to Calm stories. We’ve been on the Minions stories for about a month now, so I’m ready for a new one. [Ed. note: Calm Kids also has a partnership with Illumination, where beloved Despicable Me franchise characters narrate Sleep Stories.]