Children's Health

All children have little worries and doubts, but when they can’t stop thinking about them and it starts to affect their daily functioning it becomes a problem. OCD is a type of anxiety disorder which is characterized by obsessions and compulsions. Sometimes ocd children will become worried by certain thoughts or images; these are called obsessions.

Nightmares and night terrors are two different things, though both can be distressing for little ones and their parents alike. Night terrors are a fairly common childhood sleep disorder that is characterized by extreme terror while sleeping and the inability to fully wake up. While your child may be screaming, crying and desperately trying to escape something, with eyes wide open, he or she is in fact still in a state of sleep. In this type of sleep disorder the sleep state is a non-dreaming state and usually there is no scary dream situation or object that has caused this terror, as is the case with nightmares. Night terrors in children are a fairly mysterious disturbance that occurs during deep sleep where your child will experience terror and fear without apparent cause.

Nightmares are scary dreams that awaken children and often make them afraid to go back to sleep. They usually occur during the REM (rapid eye movement) period which happens during the last third of sleep and so are most common in the very early hours of the morning. Although adults also experience nightmares, because young children are learning new information and absorbing new experiences at an exceptionally rapid rate, they are more prone to bad dreams and waking up during the night.