Fool Your Kids With a Fake New Year’s Eve Countdown on Netflix

For parents dreading the midnight meltdown at the New Year’s Eve party, Netflix is offering a sneaky way to get your kids in bed early.

The streaming service has a whole collection of child-oriented countdowns to midnight available, featuring some characters kids will recognize. There’s a Trollhunters edition, as well as King Julien, Skylanders Academy, Pororo, Beat Bugs, and several others. The videos all range from one to three minutes and take kids through a typical count down to the new year.

The videos are a great solution for indoctrinating kids into the yearly tradition without the headache of a sleep-deprived toddler on your hands. Many parents not only deal with cranky kids on this holiday, but find themselves hitting a wall with their endurance as well. The sleep schedule of a parent is an impossible thing to predict.

For families looking to simulate the magic and call it an early night, this Netflix work-around might be a stroke of genius.

It might seem a little cruel, but kids will likely forgive you later if they ever figure it out. Pushing the clock forward for an early midnight is a New Year’s Eve tradition for many families, Netflix is just capitalizing on it. In fact, WalletHub reports that on average, 48-percent of parents countdown to midnight with their kids by 9 p.m., and 30-percent of Americans are asleep by midnight.

This is the third year that Netflix has manufactured their mock-countdowns for kids, and many parents already say it’s a lifesaver.