All about Night Terrors in Infants
Night terrors in infants can be scary for parents. You’re awoken in the middle of the night by a blood-curdling scream. The scream is so horrible you are certain your little one a wild animal or an intruder has is in your little one’s room. You rush through the dark halls to your child’s room and find him or her sitting up in bed screaming at the top of his or her little lungs. You flip on the room light looking for the cause of your child’s distress. The room, however, is empty; there is no sign of anything that could be leading to your child’s condition.
You take hold of your child and say, “What is it? What is it?” Your child just stares blankly at you, as if they are looking through you, and continue to scream. You try to hold them and comfort them, and then, after a bit more of this full bodied screaming, your child suddenly settles down—his or her little heart still beating wildly, breathing raggedly, sleep falls over them again.
The next day, no memory of the nighttime distress remains for the little sufferer.
This is a typical night terror.
What are Night Terrors?
Night terrors in infants are the sudden attacks that come over infants when they are in the early part of sleep. They typically occur in the first half of the night and they typically last for no more than half of an hour. During the episode, the infant seems to be awake but does not really respond to you in a normal manner. The infant will seem as if he or she has gone mad, being completely oblivious to normal stimuli. Having a night terror is like having an intense nightmare from which you cannot awake.
Causes of Night Terrors in Infants
Typically, night terrors are less about traumas and other more serious conditions, than they are about simple schedule keeping. Usually, children will start to get night terrors when they have been over stimulated during the day or when they have had their normal sleep pattern disrupted. For this reason, children are more likely to start getting night terrors during trips or when they have moved from their beds. Thus, if your child is prone to night terrors, you should expect them to occur on the nights after they have gone to an amusement park, or when you sleep in a strange place like at grandma’s house. Night terrors might also start to occur after you move to new location.
How to Treat Night Terrors in Infants
The treatment for night terrors usually happens before they actually occur. Once your child has started to have a night terror, you should not try to wake your little one up. Unlike a nightmare, it is difficult to break your child out of a night terror. If you attempt to do so by shaking them, they will typically be even more frightened by the force with which you have shaken them and your reaction to their condition then they would otherwise have been by the actual night terror.
Most children will not even remember having had their night terrors the next morning. Therefore, the best treatment for night terrors is just to let your child go through the night terror and watch them to make sure they don’t injure themselves in the process. (For obvious reason the top bunk is not a good place for an infant who experiences night terrors—or even for infants that don’t for that matter.)
What you can do to help children who are prone to night terrors is to make sure they get enough sleep during the day and to regularize their sleep patterns. One of the main causes of night terrors is over tiredness, so you want to make sure they get enough sleep. If they have had a particularly exciting day this may not be enough.
The other action that helps with night terrors in infants is keeping to a regular and comforting routine at bedtime—same time, same place, same routine. When you are away from home this is far more difficult, for obvious reasons. However, you can still try to keep as close to the regular nighttime ritual as possible. Try to get your child to sleep at the same time with the same ritual that you normally go through at home (e.g., brush teeth, story, and lights out). Some parents might even bring along the child’s pillow or a favorite teddy bear to help this process along.
Most infants outgrow night terrors naturally before too long.