Infant Sleep Disorders Keeps Parents and Babies Up All Night

Infant sleep disorder is common in babies throughout infancy, though a difference has to be made between disorders that are a result of polysomnography and those due to behavioral abnormalities. Polysomnography could be a case of parasomnia, sleep apnea, or narcolepsy. Parasomnia takes the form of sleep terror or somnambulism and appears to have its source in the immaturity of the central nervous system; once the infant grows older, the child can thus grow out of these sleep disorders.

Parents are most concerned about infant sleep disorders because infants who wake up frequently at night or are unwilling to sleep cause a lot of disruption in the family routine, though such disorders are not that different to those found in adults. This has led to some difficulty as scientists try to find differences in sleep disorders that occur in adults and those that occur in infants because waking up frequently is quite normal for infants two to three months old, but are considered abnormal in children that are two to three years of age.

Night Terror and Snoring

Night terror is one of the most common infant sleep disorders and usually occurs about 90 minutes after the infant has fallen asleep. In night terror the infant may suddenly wake and sit bolt upright, screaming and becoming inconsolable for 30 minutes or so, before relaxing once again and going back to sleep. Night terror is not the same as a nightmare and occurs mainly due to stress or fatigue.

Another common infant sleep disorder is nocturnal enuresis, or bedwetting, which is one of the most prevalent and persistent sleep problems in infants. This may also be a result of having a strong family history of nocturnal enuresis and children who are developmentally not up to the mark may also suffer from bedwetting.

Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, or OSAS, is an infant sleep disorder that affects between one to three percent of infants and symptoms include snoring, having difficulty breathing while asleep, or mouth breathing while sleeping. In addition, sometimes children tend to cry after waking up during the night and need parental response in order to go back to sleep once again. This may also cause a certain amount of difficulty in feeding the child on a set schedule.

Toddlers are also prone to have Disorders of Initiating and Maintaining Sleep, or DIMS for short, and this involves the infant having trouble with coping with autonomous actions and can include wanting to drink a lot of water or needing to hear many bedtime stories, in order to go back to sleep again.

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