By Sami Shields of Contemporary VA
All of us experienced nightmares at some point in our childhood. Usually, nightmares are an occasional thing. Your son probably is experiencing what they call “night terrors,” which go on night after night for a period of time, and usually entail a recurrent dream, or at least, recurrent feelings of fear.

Here’s my picture of what happens to cause nightmares, and night terrors. Your child has an acutely sensitive internal monitoring system that signals strong emotional and physical alarm at the slightest hint of danger, injury, or threat.

And because little children don’t understand yet how the world works, their minds register many situations as threatening. Their emotional alarms can go off daily. For instance, a baby might feel afraid while sitting facing the rear in her car seat, because she can’t see anyone there.

More challenging situations—going through a struggle at birth, facing a long separation from a parent, or having a scary accident—register deeper fears.

When an experience has caused fear, a child will either go very quiet and lock down his emotional system until it seems safe again, or will scream and cry with all his might. That screaming and crying serves an important purpose!

If an adult can come close, hold the child, and let him know that he’s safe now, the child will cry and thrash and keep expressing fear until the fear has been fully expressed. At that point, a child’s system is able to understand that the threat is over. He doesn’t remain afraid.

Many times, at least some of that feelings of fear stays stuck in the child’s emotional memory. The feeling lasts because at the moment the child is frightened, there isn’t the time or the support for the child to really finish expressing how frightened he became.

Parents who want to help him will try to hush his expression of fear, because we’ve all been taught that the parent is supposed to hush crying and talk (or threaten) a child out of expressing his feelings. So the feelings of fear that the child didn’t finish expressing are stashed, uncomfortably, in

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