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Taking a Night-time Stroll
Children and Sleepwalking By Carma Haley
"Sleepwalking will occur during this deep, deep sleep," says Sheldon. "Youngsters will get up out of bed, wander around the house, occasionally urinate in unusual places around the house and then either fall asleep in an unusual place in the house or walk right back to bed and go to sleep and not remember the episode at all."
Karen Casey of Ohio, whose son is now 16, said her son was about 5 or 6 when she discovered his sleepwalking. "He would walk from room to room, usually just through bedrooms and the living area," she says. "He never went outside or anything. He'd just walk about, speaking nonsense and end up back in bed."Although medical research does not have a definitive answer as to what causes sleepwalking, there are many clues. These clues include maturation rates, outside or environmental stress or anxiety, Sheldon says. However, what may be the cause of one child's sleepwalking episode may not be the cause of another. As each child matures at different rates and handles stress and anxiety differently, the causes for a child's episodes of sleepwalking will need to be individually identified.
Sheldon says the most common cause of sleepwalking is maturation issues. As a child continues to grow and their body matures, some areas will develop faster then others, causing imbalances between various anatomical systems.
"Sleepwalking is most commonly thought to be due to a maturational issue where a part of the nervous system is maturing faster then another part," says Sheldon. "As a child grows and their systems begin to even out -- or reach the same level of maturity -- the sleepwalking episodes will decrease due to a more level balance in their own body."
There are other factors that may cause or worsen episodes in children who have been known or are prone to sleepwalking called stressors. These stressors include stress and anxiety, sleepiness or being excessively sleepy, fever, bladder distention, environmental noise and being awakened within the first few hours of sleep onset. The identification of a child's stressors can offer assistance into decreasing the number of sleepwalking episodes or even ceasing the activity all together.
"Sometimes the stressors are very easy to identify: a scary movie, a test at school, a bully in the schoolyard that's picking on somebody," says Sheldon. "Other times they are not so easy to identify and the parent may need to investigate the little things that normally wouldn't be thought of as stressors such as rules or chores or even a parent's involvement in an argument between siblings."