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Hi! I’m Dana Obleman, creator of The Sleep Sense Program. If you’d rather read than watch, I’ve transcribed the text of this video below.
This week’s question is from Lucia. She writes:
“My son suffers from night terrors. He will be three in a few weeks, and he gets up many times in the night wanting to come to our bed and crying. Even when he comes to our bed, he continues to cry and it is obvious he is dreaming.
How do I stop this? I am at my wits end! I cannot get enough sleep and neither can he!”
Okay, I am not 100% sure that what he is doing is called a night terror. There is a big difference between a nigh terror and a nightmare. If your child is having night terror, it will look like they are nonresponsive to anything meaning, they do not talk, they are not making eye contact, they often do not leave their bed. It is just more of a sitting up and sort of a screaming or crying inconsolably but not responding to anything so the fact that he is getting out of bed and coming to yours and wanting to climb into bed with you, makes me feel like it is not a night terror. The good news about night terrors is that they are outgrown. Eventually, a child will just stop having them.
More good news is that they would not remember it in the morning. It is usually more terrifying to the parent than it is to the child, that is something they would not remember in the morning and sometimes just putting a toddler or a child to bed an hour or two earlier, can alleviate night terrors. They are often caused by overtiredness so that is something you might want to think about is just moving his bedtime up a little. A couple of things to think about, one is bedtime, you say he goes to bed easy enough. I am not sure what exactly that means but if you are helping in any way, meaning, you rock him to sleep or you sit with him until he is asleep, then those are some problems that you should be addressing so start by keeping him in his crib and gradually working your way out of the room if you are in there while he is falling asleep, until he is comfortable enough falling asleep on his own.
Definitely keep him in the crib. I know it is tempting to move him to a bed thinking that would solve problems but in my experience, that just makes problems worse. So if he is comfortable enough in his own crib right now, especially for the bedtime portion then that is where he should stay until you have got yourself out of this problem. As far coming to bed with you in the night, you are just going to have to keep returning him to his own bed. Often the best way to do that is to be very nonverbal so you are not going to get angry you are not going to try to coax him, you are not going to try to negotiate in the middle of the night.
In a very nonresponsive way, take him back to his bed, put him back in the crib and tell him it is still night, night, leave, go back to your own bed. If he comes back, then back he goes and back he goes until he stays. Another good thing to do especially with a three-year-old is to put a clock in his room, a digital clock, duct tape over minutes so that all he could see is the hour and start talking about seven meaning morning so no one gets out of their bed until the clock says seven, that is morning. If he sees it is not seven, he may not come to your room and he needs to stay in his bed. You could try some reward chart. If he stays in his bed all night, he gets something at seven, when the clock says seven. It does not have to be a huge thing. Lots of children will do things for a cookie or a Smartie or a sticker or a little racecar. Something that does rewarding enough that he might think about actually staying in his bed.
I would not suggest you move him to his own bed and you get into bed with him because I just wonder when will that stop. If a child gets used to sleeping with a parent, it is just like an adult. It took me a long time to get used to sleeping with a partner and now that I am used to it, if he is gone, I have trouble sleeping so if you are sleeping with your child, again, I just wonder when will that end. I know six, seven, eight-year-olds who are still sleeping with their parents because they have never learned how to sleep on their own. They are not comfortable sleeping on their own and so it just keeps going, it just perpetuates so I would definitely keep returning him to his bed, returning, returning, very nonresponsive, very neutral, it is a boring game, he is not getting what he wants. Eventually, he will stop doing it.
Also, one last word about nightmares, if it is a nightmare, you want to be careful how you respond to a child having nightmares. You definitely want to validate the fact that things can be scary in our sleep and yes bad dreams do happen, do not try to get your child to discuss the dream. There is no point in reminding him what the dream was about and no point in sort of adding to the fear. Just acknowledge that they had a bad dream that something scary was happening but it is okay, that it happens to everyone and the good news is when you go back to sleep, it is not going to happen again.
If you give it too much attention, or there is some sort of reward in having a nightmare, for every nightmare they have, they get to come to your bed, you might find that nightmares are happening every night and all through the night because they are rewarding so just be careful how you handle nightmares in the future. Thanks for your question and sleep well.
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