So my DS9 has not been able to sleep without someone sitting with him in his room, and every night ends up sleep walking into our room to sleep with us. He has been this way since he was a baby, and we even tried cry it out (as a baby), bribery (worked for a week when he was in kindergarten- now there is no bribery that would work), everything super nanny recommends (including putting him back into his bed, checking on him every 5 minutes), NOTHING works. I can't really talk to anyone else about it as I get the "you aren't being a strong enough parent" talk. My husband knows this is not the case, but anyone else doesn't get it.
Seriously, at night the kid is terrified to be alone, and neither my husband or myself (or my son) like the situation but we don't know what to do about it.
He loves to learn about dangerous and toxic things (like dangerous animals, disasters, poisonous or toxic substances, deadly diseases) which makes things difficult, as while he is fascinated during the day, at night he cannot go to sleep, he is terrified of being alone. He says it is because he is afraid of zombies and vampires, and he knows they don't exist but it doesn't matter. During the day, we will make a plan but at night it all changes. Last night he said the only thing that would work is to take away his closet (this is after we had checked it several times). I explained that nothing can get into the closet, but logic doesn't work.
During the day he also has separation anxiety at home only. I don't think he gets it at school because he is never alone there. Anyway it got so bad at one point that he wouldn't go into any room in the house alone - I had to go with him. My DD7 started catching it from him, so that got pretty bad- we were all going everywhere together. I finally decided to do exposure therapy by giving them points every time they went into a room by themselves, when they got 100 points they got to pick out a toy at target.
This has worked really well, especially with my daughter, but we cannot get my son to go to sleep on his own or to stay in his bed. We are attempting to just get him to go to sleep on his own as while we put him to bed at 8-8:30 he will not fall asleep until 10-10:30 and so my husband and I end up sitting in the hallway for 2 hours and get no adult time together.
The person who assessed him for giftedness confirmed he is HG, but said he has anxiety which made his processing speed very low. I'm sure poor sleep habits also figure into it. Has anyone had this problem, and what did you do? The assessor says I can bring him in to her for therapy but she is $$$ and we tried it a little bit already and the thing that has worked is what I came up with (the points system).
Additional information- when I was a kid I had the same problem, I loved dramatic and tragic things like Pompeii etc. that would not bother me during the daytime but as soon as it would get dark I would start imagining the tragedy and get really freaked out. The darkness always made everything magnified.
In addition, the assessor said he has anxiety at school which is why he zones out. Back story on this is that about one third of the kids were picking on him as he sucks on his fingers and (yuk) picks his nose in class -which I take to be a way of handling anxiety- but I spoke to him this morning and he said he never feels anxious or scared in class, just angry if someone teases him or if the teacher yells at him.
I handled the nose picking by taking him to the allergist and he got allergy meds which has helped tremendously. At the teacher's suggestion we got him chewing gum to help with the fidgeting and the finger sucking, this also helped.
Anyway, any thoughts?
