Children who experience difficulty getting to sleep may, over time, condition their bodies to associate lying in bed with wakefulness, rather than sleep, which substantially aggravates the initial problem. When children have difficulty maintaining sleep, they often call out to their parents for attention. Parents' excessive attention to these calls may exacerbate the sleeplessness. Night terrors, in which a child appears to wake abruptly to fits of screaming or crying accompanied by rapid breathing or sweating, are more startling to parents than they are dangerous to the individual undergoing them. In most instances of night terror, children return to sleep, never fully awakening and rarely recalling the bout the next day.
Individuals typically outgrow night terrors by adolescence.
Sometimes confused with or linked to night terrors, they actually share very few of the same traits. For instance, night terrors usually occur during the first half of the night, whereas nightmares typically occur during the latter half of the night. And unlike night terrors, children generally wake up from nightmares and recall them with vivid detail. Although there's no blanket response to this question, certain factors do affect a child's chances for sleeping soundly. Some of them include the following.