When I last reported in on Miss H’s ongoing sleep saga, I was happy to report that things were better. And they were. What I didn’t share, because I wasn’t quite ready to tackle it, was the sleep terrors (aka night terrors) that had started up right around that time.

Basically, after about 2.5 months of bedtime and middle of the night battles, Miss H was finally going to bed happily and starting to stay in bed overnight.

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And then out of nowhere right before her 3rd birthday something strange happened. One night around 9:30pm we heard Miss H cry out. We rushed into her room to find her sitting up, talking gibberish and acting totally confused. I’d heard of sleep terrors and quickly realized that’s what was happening. However, I had no clue what to do about them.

The first few times it happened I was able to give her a hug and get her to lie back down. Then things started getting out of control – she was screaming, pushing, trying to leave her room and climb on furniture. It was really tough to handle. We would turn the lights on and try and get her to snap out of it. Sometimes we were successful, other times it could take 1-2 hours to get her to get back to bed.

From the point where she started having sleep terrors, Miss H had one every single night around the same time for 2 weeks – some were resolved quickly, others were incredibly upsetting (for us).

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Because, as we learned, sleep terrors happen when transitioning from one sleep stage to another – from deep non-REM sleep to light REM sleep (which is when dreams happen). So during a sleep terror they are not dreaming and likely won’t remember the episode. They may sit up, say weird things (for Miss H, “I don’t want that”/”Stop that”), get out of bed, etc.

One article I read said the way to tell the difference between a sleep terror and a nightmare is that during a nightmare the child is scared/upset and with a sleep terror the parents are scared/upset. This is completely true! Sleep terrors would leave us shaken while Miss H would flop back to sleep.

Fortunately after that first two weeks the sleep terrors have become few and far between and we are much better at handling them. I definitely want to share what we’ve learned:

  • Sleep terrors generally happen 2-3 hours after falling asleep.
  • It’s not necessarily a sign your child is stressed or agitated, although that could be a cause.
  • Your child may not want to hug/be touched by you while it is happening. This will be hard! But your job is to just make sure they don’t hurt themselves.
  • Don’t try and wake your child up – it will just make them more upset (we learned this the hard way).
  • If you have a video monitor, use it. If we hear Miss H cry out I will watch her on the monitor. I’ve learned to give her time – if she is not incredibly upset she will just sit in her bed for awhile and eventually lie back down. If she gets more upset I will go into her room and make sure she doesn’t try and climb out of her bed or otherwise get hurt.
  • Some articles suggest to wake your child about 5 minutes before the sleep terror happens (if you’ve noticed the pattern). You’re supposed to keep them awake for a full 5 minutes and then put them back to bed. This is supposed to help stop it from happening. While worth a try, we attempted this and Miss H got incredibly upset over being woken up and I felt so guilty pulling her out of a deep sleep. It just didn’t work for us (it was nearly impossible to wake her up).
  • It will pass! We felt like these terrors would never stop happening but fortunately they did. Now they are happening about once every two weeks, at most and we are far more prepared to handle them.

Has your child ever had sleep terrors? If so, what helped you work through them?