What are night terrors, and what should I do when my child has one?

If you're reading this not long after, the house has probably gone still again, with your child asleep down the hall and your own heart still going hard. Or it may be the morning, and the child who frightened you so badly has woken bright and ordinary, with no idea that anything happened, while you feel as though you were up half the night. Either way, you probably want to know two things: whether something is wrong, and what to do if it happens again. Both have clear answers.

Most parents do the same things the first time. They pick the child up, say their name again and again, switch on the light, perhaps give a small shake to bring them round, and find that the screaming goes on, or grows. You haven't made it happen by doing any of that, and it helps to know why it went that way: trying to console, hold or wake a child in a night terror can add to the panic, make the episode longer or more intense, and make some children push back harder²³2 Leung et al., 20203 NHS, 2025.

Next time, you could stay near and let it run its course: sit or kneel close by, keep your own voice low and slow, and say very little. If a brother or sister shares the room and wakes to the noise, a few words to help them back to sleep are fine while you stay near the one in the episode. The advice from the NHS is to wait for it to pass, without trying to wake them, and to leave them free to move unless they could hurt themselves or someone else³. Most terrors cause no injury, though a child who runs can hit furniture or walls², so it helps to clear the floor around the bed and, if they're up and moving, to stand between them and anything hard or the top of the stairs.

Most episodes last a few minutes; the NHS puts it at up to about fifteen, and some go on longer²³, and even a short one can feel like an hour from the edge of the bed. Then it simply stops, and the child is soon back in deep sleep². There's usually only one in a night², so once they're asleep again, you can go back to bed as well.

A few things you can see for yourself usually tell you which it was. The first is the clock, because night terrorsnight terrors Spells in which someone, most often a child, seems to wake in terror from deep sleep, crying out or thrashing, without really being awake. They usually remember nothing of it in the morning. come within one to three hours of falling asleep, almost always in the first half of the night²³2 Leung et al., 20203 NHS, 2025. It's the scream that has you running down the hall not long after you've sat down for the evening. Nightmares come later, in the middle or last part of the night²³.

The second is whether your child knows you, and whether your comfort reaches them. A child in a terror looks terrified, heart racing and skin damp with sweat, and stares past you with a glassy look, hard to wake or console²³. A child waking from a nightmarenightmare A frightening dream that wakes you, usually from REM sleep later in the night, and that you can often remember clearly afterwards. wakes easily and completely, and is fully alert². The third comes in the morning: after a nightmare they remember the dream²³, and after a terror they remember nothing at all²³.

Some toddlers have something in between, which doctors call a confusional arousal: the child sits up confused, cries, moans or whimpers and may be impossible to settle, but without the screaming, fear, sweating or running of a terror, and again with no memory of it². It is another partial waking out of deep sleep²⁴4 Mundt et al., 2023, so it comes in the same early part of the night, and it makes sense to handle it the same way. If your child wakes from bad dreams they can tell you about, there's more on why nightmares happen and how to help.

A night terror is a sudden, partial waking out of deep sleep²⁴2 Leung et al., 20204 Mundt et al., 2023, the slow, heavy deep sleepdeep sleep The slowest, most settled stage of sleep, when it’s hardest to wake someone. Most of it comes in the first part of the night. that fills the first third of the night, before dreaming sleep takes over in the last third². Something starts to wake the child, and they only get partway there.

Researchers think the brain is divided during these moments. Brain recordings, mostly from adults, suggest that the areas that drive movement and emotion are running much as they do awake, while the frontal and parietal areas, which awareness depends on, stay in deep sleep⁶⁷6 Idir et al., 20227 Terzaghi et al., 2009. If children's brains do the same, as seems likely, it explains what you saw: a body awake enough to scream and run, alongside the part of the mind that would recognize your face, hear your voice and remember any of it, still fast asleep. That's also why your comfort can't reach them: it's aimed at the part of your child that would know your face and hear your voice.

The same picture fits the morning. There usually isn't a vivid dream behind a terror, and if a child is woken at the end, what they recall is fragmentary, sometimes only a sense of threat²⁸8 Irfan, 2024. Nobody can know fully what a child feels in those minutes, but they aren't awake in the usual sense and won't remember it afterward, so most of the fear that lasts past the night is yours.

How many other children do this? In Québec, researchers followed 1,940 children born in the late 1990s and asked their mothers every year about their sleep. At 18 months, the peak age, 34.4% of the children had had night terrors¹1 Petit et al., 2015, which makes them common: about one toddler in three.

From that peak the numbers fall away, dropping sharply through childhood⁹¹⁰9 Laberge et al., 200010 Nguyen et al., 2008, and most children have grown out of them by adolescence, so that they're uncommon after puberty²³2 Leung et al., 20203 NHS, 2025.

Perhaps someone in your family sleepwalked as a child, or still does. That matters, because a parent's history of sleepwalking makes terrors in the child more likely¹³, and part of the tendency is passed down through genes¹⁰. The two are close relatives, and up to a third of children with early terrors go on to sleepwalk later in childhood¹. There's more on that in why people sleepwalk.

If you've been through a few, you may already have noticed that the bad nights follow a missed nap, a late party or a fever. The research agrees: terrors come more often when a child is ill with a fever, overtired or short of sleep, in a noisy room or with a full bladder²³⁸2 Leung et al., 20203 NHS, 20258 Irfan, 2024. Anything that keeps breaking up sleep through the night can do it too, including conditions such as sleep apnea and restless legs²³⁸.

How much can one short night matter? Researchers in Montréal tested it in ten adults who sleepwalk, playing them a sound during deep sleep. On a normal night it set off an episode in three of them¹¹11 Pilon et al., 2008. When the same people came back after twenty-five hours without sleep, the sound set one off in all ten¹¹, while in ten people who didn't sleepwalk it set off nothing at all¹¹. Sleepwalkingsleepwalking Getting up and moving about while still partly in deep sleep. The person usually remembers little or none of it. and terrors are close enough relatives that it's a fair guess a tired child is primed in the same way.

If your child snores most nights, or you've seen them seem to pause in their breathing, that's worth knowing about too. At a sleep clinic at Stanford, doctors looked back at children brought in for frequent terrors and found that more than half had breathing problems in their sleep, and in every child who had their tonsils or adenoids taken out to treat it, the episodes stopped¹²12 Guilleminault et al., 2003. These were children with frequent episodes, seen at a specialist clinic, and the study had no proper comparison group. Even so, it makes snoring a lead worth taking to a doctor, and there's more on it under Do I have sleep apnea?.

For most children, the most useful thing is plenty of regular sleep, which means ten to thirteen hours in every 24, naps included, for children aged 3 to 5, and nine to twelve hours for ages 6 to 12⁵5 Paruthi et al., 2016. No trial has tested extra sleep against terrors directly, so this rests on what's known about sleep loss setting them off. If you want to see a pattern, a few lines on the calendar over two weeks, noting naps, late nights and the terrors themselves, can help you spot what comes before the bad nights²³. There's help with bedtimes in how to help your child sleep.

If the terrors come often and at much the same time each night, there's one tactic that has been studied, called scheduled waking: you rouse your child a little before the usual time, so the deep sleep is broken up before a terror can start. The NHS describes it as something that may stop them³3 NHS, 2025.

It rests on a handful of small studies, and the children in them who were treated with scheduled waking alone all got better⁴4 Mundt et al., 2023. Only one of them was a trial in children with a group to compare against. One group of children had scheduled waking, and in the other the families were given only an explanation of night terrors and some reassurance. Both groups got better, and in that one small trial the difference between them wasn't significant⁴. So it may help, and it may be that time and a better understanding of what's happening do much of the work.

On that evidence, it's a reasonable thing to try for two weeks. It is a nightly task for a parent who is already tired, though, and it briefly breaks your child's sleep, so it's worth stopping if the nights get worse or your child becomes harder to settle.

You don't need to say much at all. Your child won't remember the night²³2 Leung et al., 20203 NHS, 2025, so there's no need to ask them about it or make it a topic at breakfast. There's little to gain from telling them how frightening they looked, either. A matter-of-fact morning, with the day going on as usual, is often the most reassuring thing for you both. Most children need nothing more than that; medicines are kept for the rare child whose episodes are frequent and disruptive, which is a decision for a doctor²⁸8 Irfan, 2024.

Childhood terrors are often hardest on the family, through broken sleep and a great deal of parental worry². It's often the parent who is wrung out the next morning while the child eats cereal and chatters about the day, and it's okay to treat yourself as the one who had the hard night. If you're facing the day on too little sleep, there's help in how to get through the day after a bad night.

Perhaps you've woken partway through one yourself, sitting up or halfway across the room, with your heart pounding and a single picture still in your mind. Researchers in Paris heard much the same from adults sent to their clinic with severe sleepwalking or terrors. Seven in ten of them recalled at least one dreamlike image, almost always a single scene and usually with a sense of dread¹³13 Oudiette et al., 2009, and what they saw matched what they had done¹³. Most of them sleepwalked and their episodes were severe, so their memories may not match every adult's.

Then there's everyone else: a partner who was frightened beside you, or a shared room on holiday that's become something to dread. Your situation differs from a child's in a few ways, too. Terrors are rarer in adults than in children⁶¹⁴6 Idir et al., 202214 Ohayon et al., 1999, and ones that begin at puberty or later may continue into adulthood²2 Leung et al., 2020, so you may have had them on and off since your teens. Your feelings count for more, too: psychological factors play a part more often in adults than in children².

It may help to think back over the days before your last bad night. Was it a stressful week, or a day of strong emotion, even a happy one, or one short on sleep¹⁵15 Lopez et al., 2013? Those are what adults at a French sleep clinic most often named, in a study of people who sleepwalk, many of whom also had terrors. Terrors also turn up more often in people who have sleep apnea or drink alcohol at bedtime¹⁴, so a nightcap or heavy snoring belongs on that list.

That list is also where help starts: protecting your sleep, cutting back on alcohol before bed, getting snoring checked for apnea, and making the bedroom safe⁶⁸8 Irfan, 2024. The bedroom matters because some adults are hurt in an episode badly enough to need medical care, and some injure the people around them⁶¹⁵, so you could clear the floor, fit a window lock and keep anything sharp away from the bed. No one has run placebo-controlled drug trials⁶⁸, so medicine, if it's used at all, is a doctor's call.

For most families, though, it goes the way it went the first time: a scream down the hall an hour or two after bedtime, a few long minutes spent close by in the dim light, and then a child asleep again, who comes down in the morning with no memory of it and a good appetite. As the years go on, nights like that grow fewer²⁹2 Leung et al., 20209 Laberge et al., 2000, and the parent who sat on the edge of the bed with a racing heart can find their way back to sleep a little sooner each time.