How to help a seven-year-old with sleep anxiety
Children with sleep anxiety often become dependent on physical touch and night-time bed-sharing, unable to fall asleep by themselves. This constant bedtime struggle leaves parents exhausted and at a loss for how to build independent sleep habits.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Using weighted plushies
- 2Making DIY weighted stuffed animals with weighted beads
- 3Using breathing motion plushies with soft music
- 4Using warmable weighted stuffed animals
- 5lying down with the child until they fall asleep
- 6letting the child sleep in the parents' bed out of exhaustion
- 7trying an okay-to-wake clock and a reward jar
- 8sneaking away under the guise of letting the dog out or going to the bathroom
- 9consistently walking the child back to their own room multiple times throughout the night
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Ever since then, he cannot go to sleep by himself, and as he’s gotten older he seems to have a ton of anxiety surrounding sleep in general.”source ↗
“every single night he comes into our bed, needs to be as close to me as physically possible, hand on my face, touching my face.”source ↗
“he just has so much anxiety surrounding sleep and I am at a complete loss of what to do. It’s effecting my sleep very much now”source ↗
“Hello, my 7yo is having a hard time falling asleep lately.”source ↗
Where this came up
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