2 weeks ago my DS (2.7 years) experienced a fire alarm (false alarm) at nursery that he got quite worked up about. He was talking about being scared about cars etc as nursery had needed to take the children to the car park and evacuate the building (and we're always telling him to be careful in the cat park as cars are dangerous).
Unfortunately within 24 hours of this happening, we were awoken at 4am by our smoke alarm going off (false alarm).
Since then he has been understandably scared - refuses to walk up the stairs/on the landing near the smoke alarm, has to be carried and will bury his head right into your shoulder and close his eyes so he can't see it. He quite often tells us he is scares of it because it was loud.
We've talked about it (do you remember when Mr Smoke Alarm went off? It was very loud wasn't it? It scared DS and mummy and daddy but it was just being our friend and shouting "wake up!") and he will occasionally talk about it himself (smoke alarm loud) but 2 weeks on and we're still having issues. I appreciate and understand he's scared but thought it would have eased off by now.
Tonight he's insisted on being carried to bed, burying face in my shoulder as usual. He's laid in bed as close to me as possible and you can really see him screwing his eyes up as he doesn't want to open them. Thursday night he woke up in tears and ended up coming into bed with us. he was talking about " scary circle at nursery need batteries and fire engine came". He also woke up with a jump (waking both me and DH up) and shouted "it's too loud" so is obviously still reliving it and trying to process it.
Any ideas on what we can do to try an calm him down/reassure him/help him deal with it?
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Traumatised by Smoke Alarm...any ideas?
5 replies
Kyyria · 07/06/2015 20:24
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