Night Terrors In Toddlers – Causes and Effective Treatment

Night terrors or sleep terrors are quite common in toddlers. Quite many parents think that night terrors are similar to nightmare. However, they are two complete different sleep problem we might see in kids.

The differences between sleep terrors and nightmare

It is essential for parents to distinguish between sleep terrors and nightmare as they have different approaches of treatment.

• When the toddlers suffer nightmare, they will be awaken. However, when they have sleep terrors, they are still sleeping
  In the morning, the child will remember the nightmare but they don’t remember the experienced sleep terrors
• While it is possible to comfort the child while he/she has nightmare, you will find it is not possible to do so with sleep terrors simply the kids is not awake.
• In night terrors, kids can have movement such as sit up, even walk around without recognizing. However, when experiencing nightmare, kids will stay on bed until they are awake.

Possible causes of sleep terrors

Up to now, doctors still don’t know what the exact cause of sleep terrors is. However, it is assumed that inadequate sleep can be the possible cause.

Dealing with night terrors in children

As the possible cause of sleep terrors is inadequate sleep, help the baby sleep better at night can bring positive effects. Research shows that if your toddler sleeps better at night, the frequency of night terrors will be reduced. There are quite many way you can do to help children sleep better:

• Reduce daytime naps
• Practicing good sleep habits

In addition to the above methods, the intervention approach has been proven to be highly effective in dealing with night terrors in toddlers. Here are things you need to do in the intervention method:

• Records the times that your baby has sleep terrors (usually after 90 minutes since your baby fall asleep, at this time; he/she has passed theREMsleep).
• When you have the sleep terrors schedule, just around 30 minutes before he/she has another one, you will wake him/her up and then help him/her get back to sleep again.
• Usually, you will not get the same time of sleep terrors occur every night. In this case, you should wake the child up before the earliest point you recorded 30 minutes.
• It’s not necessary to fully wake up the kid, when you see he opens his eyes, you can let him get back to sleep again.

You should follow this routine for 7 days straight then skip for a night. If your kid don’t have any other sleep terror, that’s good. If the kid still has night terror, you should repeat the routine again and skip one night after 7 days.
With the intervention method, you will help the kid “skip” the sleep terrors. The second time they fall asleep; they will sleep deeper and have less chance of having another night terror.
It is always recommended that you consult this matter with the pediatrician if you don’t have confidence to deal with it alone.