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Home › Articles › Development › Could Your Child Be Having Night Terrors?

Could Your Child Be Having Night Terrors?

Handling Night Terrors and Putting Your Fears to Rest

By Laurie Dove

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A 2-year-old boy jolts upright in bed, panicked. Eyes wide, mouth circled in a scream, the terror brings his mother running, only to find she can't reach her son.

He is trapped betwixt and between caught within two layers of his own body's functioning. His mind is asleep, his body awake. He doesn't respond to his mother's touch; he struggles to free himself of her grasp. She can do nothing but watch and wait. It will end, she tells herself.

But for this Drifton, Penn., mother, it will soon begin again. Each night, Bobbi Dempsey waits for her son's screams to pierce the dullness of sleep. Dempsey's son has a sleeping disorder that plagues more than 200,000 kids: night terrors.

For parents, night terrors can be frightening to witness. For children who typically have no recollection of the event night terrors are little more than an inconvenience, say experts.

"Every night, my son was screaming and terrified. I thought he had somehow gotten hurt. Sometimes he thought someone was after him. It was a horrible thing to watch him go through," says Dempsey, who resorted to sleeping on the living room couch with her son so she could be near him and so his screams could be as far as possible from his two brothers.

When Sleep Turns Scary
Night terrors strike more than one-third of children in the United States, according to the Washington, D.C.-based National Sleep Foundation. The disorder is particularly common in boys and usually occurs between the ages of 3 and 7, says Dr. John Tedeschi, chairman of Virtua Health West Jersey's pediatric department.

For most children and worried parents the episodes are mercifully short-lived, beginning and ending within a few weeks of each other. For others, like Dempsey's son, night terrors can haunt children for years, hanging on well into the preteen years.

Night terrors happen most often when children sleep deeply. Parents who have ever carried a limp child from the car to their bed without waking, understand what it means to have a child in deep sleep. The normal sounds that would arouse a sleeping adult a slamming car door, rattling house keys, stumbling over hidden toys don't awaken these children.

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