waking multiple times

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by Guest Posts on Wed Jul 08, 2020 10:31 am

waking multiple times

We have a 4 year old boy who is having serious issues with sleep and it's affecting us badly as you can imagine.

He slept so well from the age of 1 to 3.5, and after that started waking in the night multiple times and for hours at a time. The other night he slept at about 8, then woke up shouting for us at 11pm, I went in and got him back to sleep eventually, then left and ten minutes later he was shouting again. This continued until 2:30am. This is a very common situation and happens most days of the week. He's slept through the night twice in the last 2-3 months. I would happily have him come and sleep in our bed but he doesn't settle and always asks to go back to his room after about 5 minutes. We are on the floor.

I don't understand, I would have thought at his age he would sleep deeply and soundly, what is going on in his head that gives him this kind of insomnia? He is a very happy, energetic, inquisitive and well adjusted child in the day time. I don't know what happens to him at night.

Any suggestions? I'm desperate for a full nights sleep. Thanks Sarah
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Vicki Dawson
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by Vicki Dawson on Thu Jul 09, 2020 7:55 am

Re: waking multiple times

Hi Sarah,

That sounds really difficult and you must be feeling exhausted. When children have sleep difficulties we need to make a thorough assessment to try to find out what may be causing them. There can be many factors involved. Once we have identified what the trigger may be we can start to work on strategies.

We sleep in cycles and move through these into different stages of sleep. At the start of the night we have our deep sleep then move into lighter sleep. We also have partial wakings during the night and if everything is as it was when we fell asleep we may not even remember them, we may just turn over and carry on snoozing. If however things have changed we are more likely to wake up fully.

Thinking about the start of the night and when your son falls asleep now - does anything at all change? Consider things like do you sit with him at the start of the night? Is there a landing light left on that is switched off later? Does he have a favourite comforter that he loses later in the night? Anything at all that changes needs to be addressed.

It takes around an hour for one of our Sleep Practitioners to make a thorough assessment so very tricky to do here. I hope that has given you a starting point. If you want to get in touch with the charity we do have some sleep support in certain geographical areas.
Take Care
Vicki
Vicki Dawson
CEO and Founder of The Children's Sleep Charity

http://www.talkhealthpartnership.com/on ... dawson.php

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