I know a lot of children have insomnia with stims, but is it a regular occurrence or is it sporadic? My 6YO daughter takes Focalin and Tenex, and she has been sleeping decently for a week, but is suddenly not sleeping again--with no med change.
For the last two nights, she has been very hyper at dinnertime (unusual for her). She has been silly and uncontrolled. Then, when it is time to go to bed, she is in and out of her bed like a Jack in the box, also unusual for her. Sometimes she comes out twice, but every once in a while she will come out 15 times.
I fell asleep at midnight and hadn't heard from her in a while. Then I just heard her moving around at 5 am, and she says she hasnt' been asleep. Her bed wasn't warm like you'd think it would be--I think she might actually have been awake all night long.
Does this happen to your children? I'm trying to figure out whether this insomnia could come and go, or if we need to make major changes. If it's occasional, we can handle it, but if this is a shift in her sleeping habits based on the stims, obviously we need to make a change. Only time will tell, I know, but I'm wondering if anyone has experience with this.
my experience with my daughter insomnia from meds was that is was pretty consistent.Thanks, Diane. When I stop panicking because we've had a good week behavior-wise but now might have this new issue to deal with, I realize that there is no way a 6YO (particularly this one!) could stay in her room for over 7 hours without coming out or making a mess if she were awake. I guess she probably woke up in the middle of the night and sat awake for a while and felt like she had been up all night. She is still asleep, though, at 8:15 am, so she might have been up for some period of time.
This good and relatively consistent good mood and behavior week has me nervous because it has NEVER happened before and so I'm scared for it to end in a crash.