Anyone got any experience of sorting this out.
My eldest boy is having nightmares about dinosaurs who make it dark, go raar and will "get" him after a little girl at nursery started telling him that this is what they do. The net result is him waking up in the early hours, screaming the house down and demanding to either get into our bed or watch telly.
How do we nip this in the bud?
Ta
Kill the dinosaurs?
DrP
(on a similar note...our lad has a vivid imagination, and often has nightmares, so we ty to encourage his 'good dreams' to defeat teh 'bad dreams'. They know the dreams aren't real, but it doesn't stop it being scary...
Or.show him dinosaurs CAN be nice a friendly?)
You can't he'll still be doing it at 21
Tell him that the little girl was almost right, but the dinosaurs have very good hearing, and will get himi quicker if he makes noise.
HTH.
With our little girl....
1/ we'd go around every night, peering under beds and behind doors, etc. just checking that there weren't any monsters hiding.
2/ and then told her that we knew there wouldn't be, because there aren't any monsters in Surrey anyway, because they're scared of children so have all run away to live somewhere else.
Give him a plastic sword and teach him how to switch the light on/off.
Although sobriety's suggestion also has merit 😀
Harry and the bucket full of dinosaur books - dinosaurs dont get much more toddler friendly than those
lol - I do like sobriety's suggestion... though I am not sure that at 2 1/2 he will quite get the concept 😉
The good dreams to defeat the bad dreams is a good one, it worked fairly well with our eldest lad who has a vivid / annoying imagination! Add a comedy twist to his bad dream story line, to give him funny mental images to defeat the bad ones... good luck! Its gets better after a bit anyway IME.
Tell him dinosaurs died out years ago. Get him worried about the far more real and terrifying threat of an asteroid strike extinction event.
Harry and the Dinosaurs - wonderful book! Maybe even go to a toy shop and get him some of those realistic plastic dinosaurs to help him understand they aren't nasty?
Even get him a plastic bucket like Harry's.
I used to tell my daughter not to sit too long on the toilet in our camper because there was a crocodile in there. That worked. 🙂
Having similar problems with my 3 year old. Was just dinosaurs until my wife, exhausted and in jest, told him there weren't any as the crocodiles had eaten them all. Not one of her more successful moments. Now have a nightly barrage of dinosaurs, monsters and crocodile to deal with.
Nothing helpful to suggest, just glad it's not just me
Had similar with our 4 year old recently - we found that by discussing witches (in her case) openly, having her describe them to us in detail (what they looked like, what they did in the dreams etc) that she vocalised the thoughts and the dreams subsided quite quickly.
Another tip we were told was to get her to draw witches then have her rip them up and throw them away (thereby getting rid of them). We didn't need to go that far but it sounds a good idea and a step on from what we did.
Advice we were given, which seems to have worked for us, is to never dismiss them by saying things like [i]"There's no such thing as monsters/ghosts/dinosaurs"[/i] etc
That doesn't work. Young kids live in fantasy lands where the line between fiction and reality is quite blurred. Especially given a lot of kids fiction has things like toys that come alive for children but not adults, fairies that only children can see etc etc
So instead you need to play along. Tell the monsters that they have to go home now and let little Jack sleep. Or get mum to ban the monsters from the bedroom. That kind of thing.
We just said monsters/dinosaurs are only in books and not real.
Also are they defo having bad dreams, or are they just after a cuddle in mummy and daddys bed, they are crafty buggers...
Ohh, and it doesn't help when teachers tell kids 'there are real dinosaurs in museums'. (The daughter dreaming about witches LOVES dinosaurs and wants to see some). No matter how hard we try to explain they aren't *real* flesh eating lizards, she won't have it. Teacher told her so.
😆
We just said monsters/dinosaurs are only in books and not real.
But then how does the child draw the distinction between fact and fiction? A dinosaur in a book *is* real in so much it is grounded in fact (sorry god) and I would encourage my kids to understand that.
No matter how hard we try to explain they aren't *real* flesh eating lizards, she won't have it. Teacher told her so.
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Alligator, from the Spanish [i]"el lagarto"[/i] meaning "the lizard"
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Young Komodo Dragon eating flesh.
Hope that helps 😀
Put a monkey in his wardrobe:
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That'll sort the dinosaur problem out.
Get them to watch monsters inc...so they know all monster arent bad...just some.
Get him to watch Paranormal Activity 1, 2 and 3.
He won't be scared of the dinosaurs anymore.
Our 30 month old is having nightmares about "the music stopping" no clue how to deal with it . Hopefully like everything it is just a phase.
Urgh - got him off to sleep eventually tonight, we had a teddy chasing a toy dino around the room for a while saying "shoo". I fully expect to be woken up at 1am or so though, and spend half an hour getting him back to sleep again.
Those books look good, we shall get onto them!
He still loves dinosaurs, but I think there are a special bad kind that must come out at night.
My daughter has always known that mummy and daddy's job was 'to keep her safe'. when she started being afraid of monsters I quite calmly told her that monsters are afraid of daddy and daddy keeps her safe. Worked.
Meh.
Tell him it's not the dinosaurs he needs to worry about, it's the bogeyman who will climb through his window while he sleeps.
</John Smiths>
Really what you should be doing is finding a way for him to get revenge on the girl. Get him to tell her that all her dolls are evil and are going to wake up in the night and bite her toes off. Or something.
We had something similar around that age with or eldest. I think I convinced him the dinosaurs/monsters whatever they were were too scared of the horrible rumbling snorting noise from the resting daddy.
Finally something good had come of my heavy snoring!
My 25-month-old was up at 1.30 this morning, crying. I went in to find him sitting up in bed, when I gave him a cuddle he stopped crying and said "Fishes are getting me," and promptly lay down and went back to sleep. Little bar steward!
mogrim - Member
Give him a plastic sword
This is my plan for if things get worse, or perhaps the idea of a magic (i.e. invisible) monster-killing sword that he can use to fight them off. Maybe with light-sabre type noises to make it more fun, although then I suppose I'll be woken up by him making light-sabre noises instead...
My 4.5yo daughter started fretting about the blob from numberjacks a few months back.
One night while putting her to bed, I had her mix up some 'blob-be-gone' in a tommee tippee beaker. 1 part tap water poured from a measuring jug ('blob-away'), 1 part tap water poured from a different kind of measuring jug ('blob-no-more'), 1 part store bought sports bottle water (store bought so the other components would seem less 'water'). For maybe three weeks she'd sprinkle this around before she went to bed (and sometimes after calling us back in in in the night), us remixing it as necessary. Now the beaker sits on her bed next to her pillow but we haven't refilled it / used it for ages.
Maybe some 'dino-be-gone'?
She also has a Cree XML torch in a bag that hangs by her bed - after the night that I was woken by 8 bazillion lumens burning through my eyelids, I'm less able to recommend this!
My folks got some dream eaters for us when we were sprogs- some kind of dragony statue that are big enough to be parked in the door holding it open letting some light in.
They told us they would eat any bad dreams that came around.
30 years on I still don't get any nightmares other than work ones 🙂
Whilst I like the idea of a sword... he does share his room with his wee brother and that could go badly wrong 😉
My snoring will scare off most monsters though!
[url= http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25268343 ]You could try this book[/url]
If you were a proper religious swivel eyed loon..
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lol that is awesome (snorkel, not the book which I am guessing is that one on beatings!)
He actually slept through last night, after a couple of false starts! Whether it was because his teddy was protecting him or something else I have no idea. Still - nursery today so no doubt there will be more tales to deal with tonight!
Does he have a night light in his room?
Tell him that birds are amongst the least evolved animals from the dinosaurs so when you sit down to eat a chicken you're actually eating a dinosaur. Also explain that most dinosaurs were actually plant eaters and not interested in small boys.
I think we are slightly pushing the boundaries of a 2 1/2 year olds levels of reasoning and understanding there 😉
He has a glowing clock, which puts out a reasonable bit of light. Last night we left the lights on in the room, but dimmed right down, which may have helped (though running a set of downlighters all night will get a bit expensive) so we are looking into getting a low powered night light that we can plug in and give a similar amount of light to the room now.
If only there was an Ikea in the Lake District... or somewhere close.... rather than Wigan!
We made a "Monster be-gone" spray from an old spray bottle for our 3 year old. Wifey drew a nice picture on it (monster in a red circle with a line through it) and he just lightly sprayed selected bits of his room before going to sleep. (Tip: don't put too much water in it).
Worked a treat.
Our daughter went from sleeping beauty to a raging screaming horror when she was just over two. She even managed to climb out of her cot and over the stair gate! This carried on for several weeks...
The solution we arrived at was moving her from a cot to a bed, and leaving her door open with the landing light on. It may have been a coincidence but she's been much calmer at night since.
Send him to a boarding school as soon as possible, the kids gonna be a burden.
tall_martin - MemberMy folks got some dream eaters for us when we were sprogs- some kind of dragony statue that are big enough to be parked in the door holding it open letting some light in.
They told us they would eat any bad dreams that came around.
Nothing scary about a dragon that can reach inside your brain and eat your thoughts.
Story from a friend- their first had terrible nightmares, so they got their son a dream catcher from a craft stall, got the nice lady to lay on the full native american woo thing- totally convinced. All was well for a few weeks, then suddenly he became terrified of the dreamcatcher as it must be getting full of bad dreams- what if they leak? What if it overflows and they all burst out at once? They ended up having to burn it in the garden.
The moral of the story is that kids brains are just as good at creating problems as adults.
+1 for the 'monster -be-gone' spray 🙂
My son kept on knocking his heels together and saying 'cant do it' in his sleep. He did this repeatdly. He'd been watching Wizard of Oz/ and thought he was Dorothy. 😆
I told them dinosaurs never existed, and any bones found were just a test of faith from God. Who is always watching us. Always.
I told them dinosaurs never existed, and any bones found were just a test of faith from God. Who is always watching us. Always.
Wins the Internetz
