Many of us have encountered “bad” dreams, or otherwise nightmares. Waking up in a cold sweat, a sharp feeling of being cut off from reality - all this can scare even an adult, and even more so a child. Does your child (from 3 to 6 years old) often suffer from nightmares: reasons and how to help your child? In the modern world there is a lot of attention is given to advertising, the brighter it is, the more it attracts the client. However, if for an adult it carries some possibly important semantic load, then for a child it is a set of bright, frequently changing images and pictures that influence perception, so to speak, “excite” the nervous system. For example, the child looked at the night the cartoon seems to be about good and positive things, and then suddenly he wakes up and runs to an adult in the middle of the night because something scared him in a dream and he can’t really explain it. Why is this happening? The children's nervous system is more excitable, as the child constantly absorbs new information, studies and gets to know the world. Sometimes a child’s brain does not have time to analyze the information received during the day, so scary images appear in a dream. Figuratively speaking, the brain assembles a puzzle from the information received during the day, when there are too many parts or they do not fit together, then a nightmare image appears (a monster with a bunch of eyes and paws that jumps, flies, and even shoots flames). To eliminate the cause of such “nervous excitement,” it is very important to limit watching cartoons a couple of hours before bedtime; a good alternative would be for the parent to read a favorite book to the child before bed or listen to an audiobook. It is also important to play calm games a couple of hours before bedtime, for example, drawing or taking the child to the bath. Another common cause of nightmares in childhood is quarrels between parents that the child observes. So, for example, you and your spouse had a fight over unwashed dishes. Some of you raised your voice a little, some slammed your hand on the table. You have already made peace a long time ago and are sleeping peacefully in an embrace, but the child took it much more acutely. And in the midnight darkness you hear shouts: “ahhh, a giant plate is running after me!” Observe the conversation in your family, do you often swear and raise your voice? Sometimes it may seem that the child does not notice the quarrel or does not understand that it is happening, but this is not so. Despite the fact that the baby does not always understand the meaning of what is said, he pays great attention to changes in his voice, intonation and facial expressions. If a quarrel occurred and it so happened that the child caught it. Try to explain to your child the reasons for the conflict and make peace before the baby goes to bed. Drinking tea together at night is one of the good ideas on how to relieve a child’s anxiety about parental conflict. Sometimes parents are overly controlling of their baby. For example, a parent is angry that new shoes or clothes are dirty. He says with disappointment: “Well, we just bought a new one, but you dirty everything again, I won’t buy you anything else.” The child cannot yet respond to such an “accusation” of the parent verbally, that “it happened that way and he fell or that the puddle was sooooo interesting,” so at night in his sleep all the fears that he might be scolded, punished, or not bought again come out a new toy. The recommendation in this situation is to remember that the child is not yet an adult and does not have such arbitrariness over his behavior and is not always aware of the consequences of his actions. Try to explain to him that control over him is not harm, but help, so that he can learn something new. General additional recommendations if your baby is tormented by nightmares: 1. Draw a scary dream. This will help you as a parent understand what kind of nightmare you had, and the child will feel that you are not indifferent to his fear. Add all sorts of details to the nightmare that will make the image funny and not scary. Remember, laughter is the best medicine. For example, in the film Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, in order not to be afraid of spiders, came up with the idea that all their legs are dressed in rollers and scatter when the spider tries.