Hi all,
Our 3 year old son is in a constant cycle of waking up between 11:00PM-02:00AM during the night and is having extreme night terrors that last around an hour on average; this happens at least 5 times a week now and is really becoming a huge strain on our parenting abilities/ the way we live our lives.
Originally the night terrors would have only occurred 1-2 times a week and lasted 15 minutes~. The terrors would only involve crying/ the odd bit of a gibberish sentence. We could deal and cope with this type of night terror and would know the right time to help our son snap out of it and soothe him back to a more comfortable sleep.
However, now the night terrors are occurring on what simply feels like a daily basis. Not only that but the new night terror tantrums are now lasting for 50-70 minutes on average. They've developed into a worse form of night terror which now involves: restless wandering around, hitting, screaming, crying, slamming doors, throwing random items (anything our son can get his hands on), peeing anywhere but the toilet or night nappy.
When the hitting occurs, we try to do the best thing which is to ignore what he is doing and walk away, but he has now started to follow us into other rooms and continue to do it there. We don't grab him/ try to stop him because it invokes more screaming and stresses him out more.
The screaming occurs regardless of how we talk to him (we've tried: calm, firm, quiet, loud etc.) but nothing that we say manages to get through to him. The screaming very rarely talks about what he is dreaming about but usually is one of the following:
- "Go away mummy/ daddy" we will say "ok" reassure him that we're there for him but the screaming will always continue. If we tell him that we've gone into another room he will follow us and continue to shout at us the same thing.
- "Go to work daddy" when he shouts and screams this, he literally won't stop/ go into a quieter tantrum unless I show him that I leave the front door as though I'm going to work.
- "Don't look at me" similar to the first common scream, we'll reassure him that we're not looking at him, but he'll still try and find us to scream it even louder if we walk into another room.
- "Leave me alone mummy/ daddy" this is by far the worse scream that he does; we could simply be sitting down/ standing up, trying to comfort him or doing absolutely nothing and he will still scream it at the top of his lungs. We live in a new build block of apartments, and when he has screamed this in the past, we have had our upstairs neighbours come down and knock on the door to make sure everything is ok because they have worried that we were abusing our child (Worth noting that the upstairs neighbour have a baby that is between 6-12 months old). When he screams this it severely stresses both myself and my partner out for obvious reasons as we don't want our neighbours to think we're abusing our child and we also don't want to be waking the other babies/ children in the building up.
Linked in with this, our son tries to slam a door wherever possible which again stresses us out in fear that we will wake our upstairs neighbour/ their baby up. We cannot always prevent this as we don't want to use any form of excessive force to stop him from doing so (it's a very difficult position to be in).
Lastly the peeing is (at the moment) a rare occurance. Our son has developed the habit of being in a night terror, calming down telling us that he needs to pee, then when we take him he goes into a complete meltdown about how the toilet is set up, takes his night time nappy off and just pees wherever, which then adds tidying up to our list of things to do following the meltdown.
The factors above are something that we would have been used to from where our son was a baby, but they're now so severe that we just don't know what to do.
We've tried to formalise the bed time routine, change what he's eating/ drinking, rock him at the times he's expecting to trigger etc. etc. etc. but nothing that we do seems to be able to help or get through this.
My fiance and I feel mentally exhausted and overwhelmed by this constant nightmare routine. Not only are we struggling of a night time, we're also beginning to struggle in the day as well due to the knock on effects.
If anyone has been in the same boat as us, please please give us guidance on what you have done? This has happened for the best part of the year now and we feel as though it's becoming too much.
Thanks in advance for your support.
S.