What you need to know about night terrors
Preschool: Like a bad dream on steroids – they may seem scary, but they aren’t worth losing sleep over
Photo by: Barbara Peacock/Getty Images
Anya Hutton’s daughter Morgan (now five) spent years suddenly screaming, crying and flailing in her sleep. “It was heartbreaking — she would sob and yell. There was no way we could wake her up,” says the mother of two.
Night terrors like Morgan’s are frightening episodes during which kids may talk and have their eyes open, but are actually asleep, and remember nothing in the morning. Affecting about one in five children, terrors usually start around age three. Unlike nightmares, which are bad dreams during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, night terrors happen when a child transitions between sleep stages. “It’s like having a car and the gear shift gets stuck in neutral,” says Manisha Witmans, a paediatric sleep specialist in Edmonton.
Night terrors range in length and frequency (some kids may only experience one or two, while others have them regularly) and get worse when a child is overtired, sick or in an unfamiliar bed. Hutton, for instance, could predict a terror when Morgan had an emotional day or missed her nap. When the terror is happening, don’t try to wake your child up, just gently reassure her and wait it out. (She might not register your presence.) Kids in the throes of a night terror will often flail around and could hurt themselves, so Witmans recommends clearing toys and objects away from the bed, and making sure kids don’t bonk their heads on furniture or the wall. Some children might even sleepwalk, a related condition.
If you’re worried about night terrors, mention them to your child’s doctor, who can assess if there’s an underlying condition such as sleep apnea, an ear infection or uncontrolled asthma. That was a possible trigger for Morgan: After she had her tonsils and adenoids out at age five, the terrors stopped. In most cases, night terrors diminish by school age and end by the teens. Despite the stress they cause parents, they pose no harm to kids.
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Guest_350181 says ....
I think this article skims over some other important factors of night terrors. My daughter is 6 going on 7 and struggles more with night terrors when she has read or watched something that disturbs her. For example we watched "Mars Needs Moms" as a family thinking this was a G-rated family movie, however, the concept of the boy's mother being taken away by aliens in the night had my daughter getting up sobbing to come and check if I was still there for many nights afterward! Sometimes it's hard to predict what triggers will affect them but I think children today are exposed to a mind-numbing selection of images through tv, video games and the internet. They often process these images through dreaming and when the idea or image is frightening it causes the nightmare. Another example was when we were looking for a place to rent and took our kids with us on a couple of tours of condo/ townhouse complexes. There was a theatre in one and apparently they had a loop of movie trailers running continuously. Our eldest child slipped back into the theatre to watch the "show" and when we turned back a couple of minutes later to find her, she was in tears and couldn't even tell us what she had seen until 6 MONTHS later when she was able to put words to the images. She had walked into a horror trailer and saw a child's head get cut off!!! We try to keep tight boundaries on what our kids are exposed to but with movie trailers getting more explicit, violence becoming normalized and giant tv screens in public venues, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep those disturbing and inappropriate images out of our children's lives. In our family we try to take the power away from a disturbing image by talking about it and reassuring that those things won't happen to our family. We also do our best to limit the exposure and have asked our friends and family to honour our children's sensitivity by restricting what's on the screens when they are visiting.