Re: relaxation vs activity -bedtime question...

[Guest guest]

Dear ,

I know your question was directed at Kathy, but I'm going to barge in here too and comment, since your daughter sounds like she is going through the same stuff my daughter struggles with. Annie (8) has an awful time falling asleep every night, and in therapy it eventually came out that intrusive thoughts were a big part of the problem (not violent, just upsetting thoughts about her harming or hurting the feelings of one of our pets). It sounds like your daughter is having OCD thoughts about harming someone, which is very common. Perhaps her therapist will be able to just bring up how common these thoughts are without first making your daughter confess anything - I'm sure all kids with OCD are convinced that they alone have these thoughts. As far as bedtime goes, relaxation was a wash for us too (probably because of the thoughts). We enforce a bedtime, but allow Annie to read a long time until she can fall asleep. She is often the last one awake. We do not allow any special priviledges at bedtime, because she would begin to argue for more, and we'd NEVER get her to bed. She is not allowed into our room or out of hers (but it's an ongoing battle). Basically we try not to punish her for not being able to fall asleep, but we don't reward in any way any behavior that doesn't encourage falling asleep. And her therapist is working on the intrusive thoughts. It works reasonably well, although any slipping up on our consistency causes a complete relapse and she starts popping up over and over... And in summer her schedule keeps shifting later and later. That's a hard one because we want her to be well-rested (for our sanity) but she will sleep until 10:30 if we let her. We try to wake her at 8, which is later than during school, but not too late. In reality we pull her out by 8:30 - no easy task. Her OCD or her medication has definetly wreaked havoc with her sleep schedule - her body seems to want to sleep from midnight to noon. We just try to keep it kind of normal.

Hope this helps a little,

[Guest guest]

My son has had problems going to sleep off and on since 2nd grade (he is now 14). One thing that helps was giving him Melatonin (3mg) about 1 hour before I need him to go to bed. And it almost always works. The first time I gave it to him (with p-doc okay) he fell asleep on the couch in 20 minutes because he was so exhaused from not sleeping - it would often be 10, 11, 12 - sometimes even 1:00am before sleeping. Try going to 2nd grade and learning math problems (and then rechecking all your answers in your head) on very little sleep. He would get off the bus and fall apart everyday. I still give it to him when I see him delaying even going to his room to settle down, and within 30-45 minutes he is ready to fall asleep.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Anne in CT