Help please……

[Idontwant2]

My DS is 8 and has never been the best of sleepers but we did eventually get to the stage of him going straight to sleep if someone stayed upstairs in another room until he was asleep, this was fine as would only usually take 15/20 mins.

fast forward to last year same bed routine but he started waking at 5-5.30am, then it moved on to waking in the night also. We would put him back in his bed again, then came the odd night of him not wanting to go to sleep. Now over a year later we are at the point of needing desperate help. Most nights it’s a battle to get him to even start off sleeping in his bed.

He cries, says he’s scared, doesn’t like sleeping alone. If he does eventually fall asleep it’s guaranteed that he will wake at some point in the night as early as 9 or 10pm. The only time he sleeps is if he is in a room with one of us all night.

we have made the mistake of letting him in our bed just to get some sleep but it means one of us ends up on the sofa, usually DP.

Bedtimes take so long now it’s miserable for everyone. I hate DS feeling so scared but no amount of reassurance is helping & the long nights and broken sleep are pushing me to my limits.

if anyone has any suggestions I’m all ears, should mention our bedroom is not big enough for a bed on the floor for him and I’m not sure it would be a good habit to start anyway.

He's scared for a reason so you need to find out what that reason is. Has he sleep walked? Has he had night terrors, which are different to nightmares, or maybe even Alice in Wonderland syndrome which apparently my DD had from aged 4. She only told me the symptoms when she was 11 yrs because she couldn't explain it properly until then. That was a lightbulb moment and she rarely has episodes now but for those intervening years she was petrified at night.

@Pixiedust1234

No he doesn’t sleep walk or have nightmares/ terrors.

For the most part of the night he just doesn’t seem to be in a deep sleep unless he’s in with one of us, it’s like he can’t switch his brain off to relax when in bed alone.

He says he’s scared of monsters etc but he’s not been exposed to that sort of thing on programmes, books etc. I think a lot of it comes down to separation anxiety which we’ve tried reassuring him

Monsters come in all shapes and aren't necessarily from videos or games. One DD was scared of the tickly monster that lived in her lightshade and even twenty years later insists that it wasn't her imagination. Many years later we eventually worked out the tickly monster was her DF moving her down the bed when he went to bed because she would push her head hard against the headboard (and get a bent neck). When moved she would briefly open her eyes - which were naturally aimed at her lightshade. So in her dreamstate she vaguely recalled being tickled, recalled seeing a lightshade, and ended up deciding emphatically that a monster lived there and only came out at night. In the meantime we struggled to get her to fall asleep in her bed. We eventually got there (once we learned about the lightshade monster) and started shaking it out every night, finding a specific nightlight that didn't cast too many shadows etc etc.

My other DD was scared of the moo-cow cupboard. Apparently it was where ghost cows lived. Still haven't worked that one out thirty years later but it did impact her enough that she wouldn't go upstairs by herself until we moved house. Nobody else ever heard moo-ing or other noises from it so no idea!

Maybe something similar is happening where he's mis-remembering something as he's fallen asleep and somehow it's got fixed in his brain? Hopefully you can get to the bottom of it.