Melatonin & middle of night waking

[SachiLars]

My 5yo ASD non-verbal boy has been on melatonin for about 4 weeks. Generally working well but a couple of times and the last two nights he’s suddenly been wide awake in the middle of the night and won’t go back to sleep for hours e.g. woke at 1:45 and stayed awake until 6:00. This is quite out of character as he normally sleeps through (although he always gets in our bed).

Is this more common for melatonin?
How do you fix it?

We recently tried melatonin for our non verbal ASD 3 year old and found the same thing. It was amazing at getting him to sleep as he can take up to 1.5-2 hours normally but he was either waking super early or waking in the middle of the night wide awake. We stopped using it in the end as it was also making him really groggy in the day even though he was on a low dose.
He more often than not sleeps through so we decided we would rather him take a while to fall asleep then be up for hours in the night.

This does seem to happen for some DC. There are other medications you could try either instead or as well melatonin that may suit DS better.

Update:

We pushed back the time we gave him the melatonin; so he’s having it at 8:30 rather than 7:30. It’s still helping him get to sleep easier but the night wakings haven’t happened. Seems more in line with his natural rhythms. Fingers crossed it continues.