Is my daughter having night terrors?

Morgan - posted on 05/16/2010

Sounds like night terrors to me. My husband is navy and gone a lot. Because of that my daughter has a VERY close bond with him. Whenever he's been gone for about 3 days she starts having them. She'll have them every night until he gets home. My pediatrician recommended holding her wrapped in a blanket and just rocking her. Also talking to her in a low soothing voice seems to help. It's calming to her. It generally takes me about an hour and a half to 2 hours to calm her back to sleep.

Patricia - posted on 05/15/2010

The one thing about night terrors that theyre not nightmares. Its a sleep disorder. Both my children have them and so do their grand parents. My son is 4 his started around a year went for hours on end all I could do was make sure he didnt get hurt with his thrashing. As he got older they have gotten better. I have found leaving a tv on for comfort noise helps. He also has asthma and giving breathing treatments(weather he needed them or not) before I went to bed helped too. My daughter just started haveing hers. When the terror occurs i just go a check on them and stand there until its over. If they wake up after wards I do comfort them.

Chelsey - posted on 03/30/2010

My son still has night terrors to this day and he is five. All I could do was make sure I read him a super cheerful book at night with lots of colorful happy pictures. Alot of the time it works, but if your child has night terrors its going to happen once in the while regardless. Also if it does last into their toddler years have them sleep with a special stuffed animal and before they close their eyes to fall asleep, ask them to tell there special animal what they want to dream about. I told my son that his bear was a special dream bear, that would make sure he would only have good dreams. I have been doing this for about two months now, and believe it or not it actually works very well!! Good luck!

Pamela - posted on 03/28/2010

my first born did this turned out it was teeth he had a narrow mouth so the pressure of the bones moving to make room made him wake up screaming we would have to pat him back to sleep.. he got over it pretty soon

Sarah-Anne - posted on 03/28/2010

my daughter had them for about two straight weeks a few months ago. we eventually had to just let her scream it out one night and after about 45 min of non-stop screaming, she laid back down and rolled over and went to sleep like nothing ever happened. and it hasn't happened since. it seemed that every time we'd try to comfort her or be there when she wakes up from a terror, it made it worse and she wouldn't go back to sleep for over an hour. it was hard to let her scream for so long, but it's all we could do.