Those who have dealt with night terrors... I need your help/advice PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!

[CrazyLady]

can't read and not post. When we have had them here they have passed quickly but the girls at MG and I were talking the other day and some additives could be causing them. Might be worth checking the failsafe website and seeing if there is a link? Hope you find something that helps soon, sleep deprivation sucks. xoxo

DD was getting triggered by caramel III natural colour. Also one called "Annatto" but I'm not sure if it's the same thing. She can't really talk yet but I ask her before we go to bed what we did that day and she has a good 30 minute ramble about her day (mainly random noises). That seemed to help us.

HTH hun and hope he settles soon

[Beach Mama]

That's right, Annato which I think is 160b from memory is the one we were talking about. Seems to be in just about everything so a little hard to cut out but not impossible.

[~Lashes~]

my ds2 is about the same age, and every few nights he wakes up screaming the house down, convinced something is crawling on him. i have to turn his light on, wake him up and show him that thgere isnt anything there and it was a dream, then comfort him enough that he is calm enough to go back to sleep, but cant turn the light off after that, else he wakes up worse, so i put the hall light on else ds1 wakes from the light. ive also noticed if the hall light is left on all night, not sure what one but, it either dosent happen, or he dosent need to scream the house down because he can see for himself.
maybe a night light might help?

[~*Niadalla*~]

Got the light on in the hall and the door open ( if we didn't, he'd soon let us know! haha).

I'm considering trying a dummy tonight to see if it helps and then if it does, I can wean him off it slowly (although I doubt a dummy would do much... but there's no harm in trying hey!).

As for foods... I will look into that. He's got a HORRIBLE diet because he's the worlds fussiest toddler. Thanks ladies!

[{sarah}]

The first thing to remember is that night terrors are not about being frightened. It is a physiological response to the brain changing between the stages of sleep too quickly. Routine changes, bedroom changes, talking about things etc isn't going to have an affect on how his brain is working.

Generally night terrors happen in a progression, in that they will start off slowly (maybe once a week), build to the worst point (can be up to several terrors per night) and then taper off again to nothing. We have been dealing with them going on five years now, luckily DS is only having them once every 4-6 weeks now, rather than the up to six times per night every night we had at the beginning of the year.

There are medications that you can get, but you need to have a paed assessment & they only offer them in very severe cases where the child isn't growing properly due to having improper sleep. Our DS, while he was a bad case was not bad enough to warrant medication.

The only thing that we could do was to wake him. If the terrors happen at a certain time every single night then you can wake the child to reset their sleep cycle. Doing it after only a certain amount of time won't work, you have to catch the particular cycle that causes the terror. So if he wakes at 1.00am every night, go in wake him at 12.55am. Make sure he is fully awake & can answer a question. Offer him a drink of water or take him to the toilet if he's not in nappies. Most times it will work. It seems like a pain to set an alarm to wake him at the right time, but 10-15 minutes of waking him & resettling him is far better than dealing with the screams I can assure you