WHAT TO DO IF YOUR CHILD “HAS NIGHTMARES”?
I have two children, and several times I’ve encountered situations when a child wakes up in the middle of the night crying. For me, this is quite unpleasant because:
- The child doesn’t always calm down immediately, and it often takes a relatively long time to soothe them;
- It can happen again the next night.
- And of course I don’t like when my kids are upset and crying.
In this case, it’s even more challenging because the crying often wakes up the other child as well. So, both the kids and we, the parents, don’t get enough sleep. My parents told me that the same issue occurred when my brother and I were little — we “had nightmares.”
However, despite this “diagnosis,” no real solution was offered. I started researching the issue and discovered two interesting points:
- Nightmares may occur due to a lack of vitamin B1;
- Vitamin B1 is depleted during the digestion of sugar.
Our children love sweets, so it became clear why this might be happening.
To test this, the next time one of the children “had a nightmare,” early in the morning we gave them B1 (of course, in a smaller dose than for adults), and the nightmares stopped.
Along with B1, we made sure to give them vitamin C (to help with the absorption of B1), as well as calcium and magnesium (since B1 can negatively affect dental health without them).
We’ve made this approach our standard practice, and now such situations rarely occur (no more than once every six months to a year), and they never happen two nights in a row!
So now, both my wife and I, and the kids, sleep sweetly and peacefully through the night :о)
