help please. posted this earlier but no response. My 8yr ds has sleep problems.

[catherina70]

My 8 year old has no problem going to sleep by himself, but has started waking in the night and will no - point blank refuses - to go back to sleep by himself. He works himself up into total hysteria and my partner & I are at the end of our tether. we have tried restricting Tv, xbox, play etc and no threat/action has served to "encourage" him to go back to sleep. more often than not after over an hour of screaming & crying we give in and either one sleeps in with him or he sleeps in our bed. any advice?
:(

not at all thank you. it was very consuctive. we need all views on this. end of tether and all. still he will not say what is bothering him. will not say why he has woken up. he is normally a very open little boy too. x

contructive even.

He may not know what is bothering him. He is still young and it can take a while to understand and identify our feelings. He may just be awake or feel vaguely uneasy about something.

Our ds had a particularly bad phase and we couldn't figure it out at all. Then his class did their assembly and he walked across stage with the poster that he had to walk across stage with. Then the phase ended and we went back to normal. Afterwards he was able to say that it was the assembly that was troubling him but beforehand he had no idea what was wrong with him. (He is a bright and articulate boy btw.)

Knowing what is troubling him may not be essential. Teaching him how to manage the feelings he has, wherever they came from, might be more important. That will be a much more useful life skill.

BTW the idea that the psychologist took her cues from us is far from the truth in our case. The methods we used went "against the grain" for us, hence our previous choice of co sleeping. The psychologist made it clear that we had taught him to soothe himself with our presence and we had to teach him a different method of calming his emotions.

Totally with you there carrots. Teaching children 'emotional' intelligence is a much more useful skill than 'academic' intelligence. I think we would all rather our kids were happy bin men than crackpot geniuses .

conors I am married to a crackpot genius who had the emotional intelligence of a frog. He has improved over the years 20 years we have been together though. I would rather ds started learning now than leaving it for a girlfriend to teach to him in his 20s!

There are some helpful workbook sort of books on Amazon here which may or not be helpful as a starting point to sorting out your ds's concerns.

There are a few different ones relating to sleep, worry, temper, etc so have a nose around and look at reviews to find one that best suits your son.

Sounds like we have alot in common carrots!! I learned an awful lot from books about child psychology/emotional intelligence - which was highly valuable to me as my mother has even less than your DH ;)