It's Not a Night Terror, And Other Summer Mysteries
Insight into a Handful of Vexing Miscommunications Between Toddlers and Those Who Love Them
A week or so ago my toddler was drinking a milkshake.
Or, he was trying to drink one.
But after just a few sips, he began crying in intense frustration, shoving the shake away and then demanding it back, wanting it and rejecting it simultaneously.
Milkshakes are cold, sweet, calorie-dense, and hydrating. They are independently accessible to little kids and are not a choking hazard. They are messy if spilled, but easy to contain. If it’s hot and your kid has lost their appetite, or if they’re teething and don’t want to chew, or if they have an ear infection with referred pain to the jaw, milkshakes can be a lifesaver both as nourishment and to ease discomfort.
But they also come with a widely overlooked potential access barrier: the straw!
A fast-food straw is often quite large in circumference for small mouths, requiring a lot of facial muscle work to create enough suction to start the flow of a heavy, dense liquid, especially when the milkshake is partially melted and variable in weight. That can make it hard to drink the shake, especially for kids who have low muscle tone or are still working on the oral motor skills involved.
It can also mean that unpredictably large quantities of melted shake end up coming through the straw at once, creating too much cold or too much liquid to deal with, especially in kids who have swallowing difficulties.
So, a too-wide straw can be super frustrating, leading to the rejection of the shake even by a kid who really really wants it, and that leads to deep frustration after it is taken away by a well-meaning parent who rationally concludes that the kid is done drinking.
Watching my kid finish off the shake once I had offered a narrower and thus easier-to-use stainless-steel straw was super rewarding; and watching me remain in communication with him as I tried to problem solve, offering calm in response to his distress, helped keep his frustration a bit lower, too.
This episode got me thinking about all the other mysteries I’ve been revisiting lately with my second child—things that are tricky to navigate with kids who are not yet speaking, or who are still developing their access to a robust communication system.
Here are a few that are especially relevant to the hottest days of summer, in the spirit of helping others reach an “aha!” moment sooner, and hopefully with a little less sweat.
1. Toddler wakes up screaming and inconsolable after nap.
What: My little kid was overtired from running around in the heat. Being overtired or too hot can delay the onset of sleep, particularly at nap time. I needed to wake him up before he’d gotten his usual two-hour nap so that he wouldn’t keep snoozing dangerously close to bedtime and impact his overnight sleep.
When I woke him up, he screamed and cried inconsolably, arching his back, trying to climb into my lap but then struggling immediately to get away, as though he was in pain. Nothing I did helped him regain calm, but after about twenty minutes, he settled on his own. This looked like a night terror. It would be easy to mistake for a night terror, or even a nightmare. But this was something different.
Why: Interrupting sleep, especially at nap time, and especially in kids under age 5, can lead to confusional arousals/arousal confusion: basically, in suddenly moving out of sleep, the brain and body are not fully in sync, and the brain may not fully have reached complete wakefulness. This is much more common in young children than older children and adults, and most kids outgrow it.
For the child, this can be very disorienting, leading to grogginess, confusion, and sometimes thrashing, crying, or screaming.
My solution:
First: To help prevent these episodes, it helps to encourage wakefulness to arise gradually rather than waking a child abruptly.
This could mean turning on the hallway light and opening the door to the child’s bedroom to let some light in without dramatically and suddenly changing the level of brightness; shutting off any white noise or fans and then waiting a few minutes for the change in sound to coax the child out of sleep; or playing quiet, gentle music or bird songs at a low, slowly increasing volume.
It also helps to stick to a sleep schedule, start calming down and cooling off for nap an hour beforehand so the transition to restfulness is gradual and gentle and you don’t end up with an overtired kid, keep sleeping spaces cool and keep excess light out of the room.
Once your child is experiencing arousal confusion, it’s a good idea to keep the sensory load low, be present and calm, wait on things like diaper changes, and offer gentle, low-demand assurances that you are present and that everything is okay.
During confusional arousals, the child doesn’t reach full consciousness, and won’t remember the event later. Trying to push the kiddo into full wakefulness can backfire by prolonging the episode, and being present, patient, and calm is the best course of action. These often end as suddenly as they came on, usually after about ten minutes (though sometimes longer—for my kiddo it often takes over twenty minutes).
Note: Because it can be tricky to tell these episodes apart from a child waking up in pain or experiencing certain other types of medical and neurological phenomena, it can be helpful to check in with your child’s doctor if the crying lasts longer than a half hour or so, if they don’t return to their usual behavior and alertness level afterward, or if you notice any other concerning symptoms or just have a gut instinct that a check-in is a good idea (it never hurts).
2. Toddler is rosy-cheeked and sweating, but refuses to cool off in the water table.
What: My little-kid comes home from daycare on a very hot afternoon, hot, sweating, and very irritable. I invite him to play in the water table, and he says no over and over.
Why: As with being too hungry or overtired, being too hot can make it hard to accurately assess your needs, leading to a general state of dysregulation.
The offer of play in the water table can feel like a demand because it requires a response, and demands are the last thing you want when you feel this way.
You know when you stub your toe on a door that’s literally always been there, but somehow you forgot, and pain shoots through your entire body?
Imagine if your mom ran over in the moment of the most intense pain and started asking you again and again and again if you would like an ice pack. Right in the throes of the pain, the answer you’re likely to give is “PLEASE GET AWAY FROM ME!”—but instead, she tries to drag you toward the freezer.
This is well-intentioned, reasonable, and totally unhelpful.
My solution: I ask my toddler to wash my spoons. Novelty can make the offer/request rise above the inner noise in a way that the familiar and routine can’t; having a job affirms sense of agency, and tolerance for discomfort is often higher when you feel you have some control in the situation.
Spoons are not sharp or breakable, so they can be handed to the child to manage independently, and can be washed directly in a water table (or a kitchen sink if that’s more convenient), getting cool water on the blood vessels in the wrists, which helps create a full-body sense of cool even faster than an actual change of temperature occurs.
Once the kid feels cooler, the kid is able to regain calm.
3. Toddler loves cold, refreshing strawberries, but is rejecting them today and won’t eat anything.
What: I know my kiddo likes strawberries. I know they’re a preferred hot-weather food. Today, my toddler is refusing them and, as with the milkshake, still appears to want them.
Why: By now, I think most of us recognize that kids can find the sensory challenge level of berries to be relatively high, because even berries that look exactly alike can have variable levels of sweetness, tartness, squishiness, firmness, etc. A kid who is overheated or worn out from extra physical activity may find this demand level too high on a hot summer day, even when that kid does want to eat them.
My solution: Puree the berries and add a teaspoon of honey or maple syrup (note: do not give honey to babies under 12 months). Pureeing them and adding a small amount of sweetener makes the texture and flavor consistent. You can pour the berries over full-fat Greek yogurt for extra protein and hydration, or you can freeze them in an ice cube tray with popsicle sticks to create tiny strawberry pops (especially great on a very hot day).
4. Toddler requests water bottle, so I give him a flashlight, and yet he’s still frustrated.
What: My toddler loves playing with the straw and the clasp mechanism on his sister’s water bottle because he is very interested in anything mechanical. He repeatedly asks me for his sister’s water bottle, but it has started to show signs of wear from all of his playing with it. Feeling very clever and pleased with myself, I offer him something that I think will meet the same need: a flashlight. A button to play with for the mechanical aspect he seeks in the water bottle, plus a light that turns on and off for cause and effect (which, in the case of the bottle, he gets by pouring water all over my house).
Does my toddler love this?
Does my toddler think I’m brilliant?
He does not.
My toddler is livid.
Why: He was asking for the water bottle because, shockingly, he wanted water.
My solution: Be curious, calm, and open-minded. Instead of getting frustrated when a child seems to be asking for something you’ve already given them, or when it’s hard to suss out the need at all, consider the many different things an object, or a word, or a gesture can actually represent.
One can argue, as linguistic philosophers have, that the word “table” means something different every time it’s used, because the quality of the light, the time of day, the number of graham cracker crumbs, the people sitting at it, and on and on, all have bearing on the meaning of the word in each specific instance of its use.
So it is with toddler communication: there is nuance, even in small vocabularies.
It is such an act of love to honor that, and to stay gentle in the discomfort—with yourself, with the child, with the situation—and try to understand.
5. Toddler has spent a few weeks watching me try to charades my way through solving his simple and clearly communicated problems—and despite my flailing and my failure, he still wants to give me a hug.
This one is not a mystery, friend.
You’re doing a great job.
Splash some water on your sweaty face.
Take a moment to appreciate the curiosity and compassion you’ve offered your child—and then, ideally, get an iced coffee to fuel the next round.
You’ve got this.
Love this xx
Really beautiful. Thanks for helping to find some meaning and design to all the frustration and screaming. (Mine and my kid's.)