Nightmares: How to help your children
According to Alan Siegel and Kelly Bulkeley, in Dreamcatching: Every Parent’s Guide to Exploring and Understanding Children’s Dreams and Nightmares,children suffer more nightmares than adults - especially before the age of six. The good news is that the frequency of nightmares diminishes as your child grows older, studies have found.
Nightmares, Siegel and Bulkeley say, are a normal part of being human and help us cope with the changes we must face in life - and for children often are reactions to upsetting events in their lives and relationships.
Siegel and Bulkeley recommend the “Four R’s” to bring your child relief from nightmares:
Reassurance.
Parents should help their children “welcome” their dream, the authors say, putting special attention on physical and emotional reassurance. Help your children through the negative, jittery feelings a nightmare can leave them with. Then talk to your child about the dream and try to discover the creative possibilities and what possibly caused the nightmare in the first place.
Rescripting.
This is where parents can invite children to revise what happens in the dream by re-enacting or rewriting the plot. The authors say this is the same as “assertiveness training” for the imagination. For instance, if there is a monster chasing your child in the dream, encourage your child to think of a way to trick the monster to make the scenario less intimidating. You can help your child come up with his or her own set of “magical tools” to ward off threats in the dream.
Rehearsal.
This means you help your child practice solving the problems of the dream over and over until there is a sense of mastery achieved.
Resolution.
Here parents help their children understand and correct the problems the children are struggling with in real life, as they are related to their dreams. The idea is to take the negative experience of a nightmare and turn it into a positive experience through helping the child master his or her fears through collaborative family effort.