Supporting Your Child Through Nightmares and Night Terrors

Understand the differences between nightmares and night terrors and learn supportive strategies to help your child navigate these common sleep disturbances.

1. Identifying the Experience. Nightmares typically occur during REM sleep and involve vivid, frightening dreams. A child experiencing a nightmare will often wake up fully, remember the content of the dream, and seek comfort from a parent. Because the child is awake, they can usually be calmed through reassurance and physical presence. Night terrors, by contrast, occur during deep, non-REM sleep. During a night terror, a child may appear to be screaming, thrashing, or talking, but they are not actually awake. They may have glassy eyes and remain unresponsive to your attempts to soothe them. It is common for children to have no memory of the event the following morning.
2. Approaches to Nightmares. When a child wakes from a nightmare, many parents focus on providing a calm, reassuring presence. Some families find that simply sitting with the child until they feel safe is effective, while others encourage the child to talk about the dream if they wish to do so. The goal is to help the child feel secure enough to return to sleep, rather than forcing a detailed discussion of the dream's content. If nightmares become a recurring pattern, some parents look at the child's daytime environment. They may consider whether the child is encountering stressful media, complex storylines in books, or significant changes in their daily routine that could be contributing to anxiety.
3. Approaches to Night Terrors. Because a child is not truly awake during a night terror, the most common advice from sleep researchers is to avoid trying to wake them. Attempting to wake a child during a night terror can lead to increased confusion or agitation. Instead, parents often focus on ensuring the child is physically safe—such as preventing them from falling out of bed or bumping into furniture—and waiting for the episode to pass on its own. Once the episode subsides, the child usually drifts back into a calm sleep. If night terrors are frequent, some practitioners suggest keeping a sleep diary to see if there is a pattern, such as the timing of the episodes or the child's level of sleep deprivation, which can sometimes be a contributing factor.