Advice for supporting an eight-year-old with severe sleep anxiety

[Sle3pyPanda]

Hello all,
First time posting here.

We are having trouble with my eight year old son. He is struggling with sleep anxiety and has done so for several years. I'm taking him to the doctors next week to see if he may have any neurodivergence (anxiety/ adhd/ OCD etc).

We have exhausted all options when it comes to sleep (no tablets/ screens/ reading/ nightlight/ no nightlight/ regular checking/ audiobooks) and it's now affecting my relationship with my husband. From 7-10/11pm we have the same situation at bedtime and it's draining as we have no time together. My husband loses his temper particularly when my son screams/ has panic attacks and wakes up our four year old.

My son wants to sleep but he is scared that he won't be able to sleep and will be the last one awake.He has now been getting anxious earlier in the day. I have tried to reassure him over and over but he doesn't seem to want to listen.

When he does fall asleep he often wakes up between 15-30 minutes later. And then we are back at square one.

He has a residential school trip coming up and at this stage we can't allow him to go. He has been away with cubs camping before but he said he spent the first night wide awake.

If anyone has any advice (however obscure!) please share. I feel broken.and I want some time in the evening back!

Thank you!

Does he have a healthy diet? Maybe he suffers night mares , can't you just let him go to sleep with a night light or something. When I was younger, I couldn't just fall asleep in the dark room. could he have half hour reading until he falls asleep naturally instead of being completely shut off from everything.

Would it just be easier to let him stay up for the summer holidays, he goes to bed when you do? Or let him.stay up I his room readi g or playing no pressure to sleep?
Or you could just let him sleep with you, it honestly won't be forever, im.sure your husband can just grow up and be the adult for a few months.
Edited to add when my kids were that age they had to be in thier rooms at whatever time, but if they didnt want to sleep they could read or play quietly. I mean you can't force someone to sleep.

We had a year of this around the same age, we allowed DC to sleep on a mattress on our floor (fully made up bed). One Sibling then decided they were being left out so they came in too- ridiculously cramped. We tried not to make a thing of it, sibling got bored and went back to own room. DC was then persuaded to try starting bedtime in their own bed, then kept coming through and eventually after a year when they knew they could always come in our room it phased out. I checked that they were ok with the mattress being put away before we unmade that bed. Looking back they were doing a lot of mental development, where do you go when you die, how do I know if I’m dead - lots of swirling thoughts - a distant elderly relative died in their sleep too and had a peaceful death which is what we’d all want but I think knowing that added to the worries. Try asking what he’d like his bedtime to be like and try to accommodate

To add - I’d often get woken in the night with questions around death or they’d be crying or scared after a dream and DC would want a cuddle or we’d end up co sleeping- they just wanted to feel safe and secure while they tried to make sense of the world

If it were me I'd do a fake call to the doctor. Then say good news, new research shows we need to do an angletilt repositioning and it'll make you sleep. Then I'd move his pillow down the other end of the bed and say that sleeping this way solves it.

If that doesn't work then I'd probably ask someone abroad to send over some melatonin see if it can kick the fear.

ADHD does mean bedtime is typically 3 hours later than 'normal' so definitely worth pursuing.

We had so many struggles with our daughter. She got an ASD diagnosis at 9.

Some things to try right now

• bedtime isn’t sleep time, it is rest time. He can read as long as he wants or have a quiet toy. I recommend a Kindle Paperwhite as it makes it easy to keep the lights off and the child can just drift off reading
• by this age we had what we called the “floor bed” in our room. It was a camping mat and some blankets. Dd was free to sleep on it when she needed. We did sometimes have to set rules like staying in her own room until 10pm so she would at least try to sleep in her own room
• Take yourselves out of bedtime. Write out the bedtime steps and organize them in some fashion like cards or a magnet board. There are tons of ideas online. He follows the steps and gets himself ready. You are no longer directing him and it takes away the adversarial issue that naturally arises when he is dealing with anxiety already
• our doctor recommended melatonin. We are not in the uk so this was a simple thing to acquire

after the ASD diagnosis and working with therapists, I finally acquiesced to a tv in the bedroom. We had content control and kept the remote for the longest time, but it helped. She didn’t abuse it so we eventually gave her the remote, but kept strict content control (we actually ran it off a home server instead of connecting it to the internet but that is probably overkill, there is better tech now) Just knowing if she panicked in the middle of the night and could turn it on helped keep the panic attacks less frequent and less intense. She is 17 now and she rarely turns it on.

Aw OP, this really resonated with me as I was exactly like your 8 year old! I was so terrified of being the only one awake - I used to convince myself I could hear burglars/ smell smoke etc.

I would tell him he has to stay in his own room (quietly, doesn’t have to sleep) and if he’s still awake at 11pm he can come in your room. I think that would have helped me, knowing I could relax and try to sleep, and if not there was a back up.

Magnesium or melatonin to help break the cycle

I would just let him sleep with you for a while. It’s got to better than this and it will break the cycle of anxiety and anticipatory anxiety about the anxiety. If it were me:

• look at his inputs. Food, sunshine , water, visual content. Is he playing violent games or watching anything scary at any point during the day.
• exercise. He needs to run around or be physically challenged to the point where it’s puffing and difficult every day to release happy hormones and discharge pent up stress. Also to make sure he’s physically tired at the end of the day
• let him stay up later with you. Don’t try putting him to be too early
• 1 hr before reasonable bedtime - he does shower /bath, gets ready
• 30 mins assigned for wind down where you will chat, cuddle, read to him in your bed
• when that finishes, turn on Yoto daily
• yiu keep lying beside him in the dark but you will be reading/watching something on your iPad to stop you getting frustrated.
• when you are ready to sleep, just go to sleep too and let him stay there
• then when he is calmer and his brain has worked out that he can sleep and it has broken the cycle you can look at shifting some of the routine to his bed
• if that doesn’t work, try melatonin gummies

-

Just to add I’d really look at the bedtime and try to talk to your husband and adjust expectations about having time together after the children are asleep. When they’re really little that might happen but the older they get the later they stay up. If you’re trying to put him in bed at 7pm that sounds very early for an 8 year old.

If you look up the sleep recommendations for 6-12 years the minimum is 9 hours so I’d start with maybe 10 hours and work back from whenever he has to get up. So a 9pm bedtime if he has to get up at 7 am.

He plays or watches tv after dinner and you and your husband have some time then go elsewhere and spend time together before the bedtime wind down with son begins at 8.30.

Two things to try….

Let him wear your dressing gown to sleep in.

Let him lie in your bed to relax until you get to bed.

Doctor will probably recommend melatonin. It’s great for getting them to sleep, but not so much for keeping them asleep. But it sounds like the former is your son’s main issue.

My DD is autistic and was like this. We had to lie with her to get her to sleep until she was 9, at which point it resolved itself. She has melatonin, which helps, but at some point she just got less scared. She’s still anxious and a bit scared but it doesn’t stop her from sleeping. We were at our wits end, but it really did seem like a developmental thing where she just sort of outgrew it at a certain point.

I have an autistic DC with OCD related to sleep anxiety. She has always been a poor sleeper but used to go to bed ok and wake in the night. Now it is going to sleep that causes the issues. Sleep anxiety can also worsen at times when the child is anxious about other things. I'm afraid you might not like to hear that the only thing that has worked is to let her sleep with me in my bed. It is easier for me as she is a bit older so goes to bed later anyway but after a couple of weeks of sharing with me she started to go to sleep by herself (in my bed, but still by herself) until I came up.

She is working with a therapist (that I have to fund privately) and we are working towards a gradual return to her room. We are reorganising her bedroom and getting some new bits for it so it is "nice" in there - she gets stressed about it being disorganised but hates throwing things away so we are getting new storage. Then will try to start a gradual return of eg 1 night a week.

I also agree that time together after the children are in bed is a phase that does not last anyway.