What Are Night Terrors?

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Night terrors. What are they and what do you do about them? I'm Dr. Alan Greene, and I want to discuss this common childhood issue with you called night terrors, or sometimes 'confusional arousals' in some of the parenting books. What happens is a young child sometime shortly after bedtime will sit upright, open their eyes, start screaming, not recognize their parents, and seem extraordinarily frightened. What's going on? Well it turns out that they are not having a nightmare. They're not actually afraid of anything conscious that they can remember and they're not awake. They're actually stuck between different stages of sleep and have this big adrenaline rush that is causing all of these behaviors with no conscious thought going with it at all. Now the typical idea of what you should do during a night terror, confusional arousal, is perhaps hug the child. But sometimes it will make it even worse. My wife Cheryl came up with an idea for treating night terrors that I absolutely love.