Does he have a cellphone? Our son has started sleeping with his watch on that has an alarm with is both sound and vibration. He is able to wake up on his own..Good luck
there are all types of alarm clocks these days. Have you tried the sunrise one? Also, if he has an apple phone, see if it can track his sleeping. You can also get a sleep study done if you ask his doctor.
Thank you. We did a sleep study with my older kid and the center looked at just ruling out sleep apnea. I need to find someone who will look beyond sleep apnea.
It's important to consider that different people have different sleep needs, even vastly different sleep needs within the same family. (Also, an individual's sleep needs can change over time.)
For examples, I'll relate some of the sleep differences within my own family (two parents and four children; note, my kids are currently 30, 22, 11 and 9).
~~~~~
Starting with myself:
• From my youngest memories (about 4½) until my early 20s, I needed about 10 hours of sleep each night, had difficulty waking up before 6:30 am, and was notoriously difficult to wake up in the middle of the night.
• I remember being woken up by an earthquake when I was about 11-12 years old, but the shaking had gone on long enough before I awoke for me to have a dream that a big-rig truck was trying to haul away my house, with me and my family still inside. By the time I awoke, my mom had already crossed the upstairs of the house and was bracing herself in my bedroom doorway...it probably took her 10 seconds to vault out of bed, run across the house, and start shouting to me and my brothers to stay put (because if I stood up by my bed, I would have been next to the window...the biggest danger in the room if it broke). {We were living in San Diego at the time, so that was probably the 1986 Oceanside quake, which was 5.4 on the Richter Scale and the first earthquake that I can remember experiencing.}
• Later on, I easily slept through any earthquakes that were less than a 5.5, but eerily woke up minutes BEFORE the Big Bear and Northridge quakes, which both occurred before 5am. (By that time, my family was 100 miles by car northwest of San Diego, about 70 miles inland from LA.)
• I was also prone to teeth grinding (reportedly more common for people with ADHD than for people without).
• From my mid-20s until I was 40, I was still a heavy sleeper, but got by on an average of 6½ to 7 hours of sleep. (I had to adapt for marriage and raising kids...especially for getting up with newborns.)
• When my youngest was born with breathing problems, I adapted overnight to become a light sleeper...so light that I would wake up to the sound of *silence*. If I didn't hear her breathing, I would wake up in a panic. (She wasn't breathing when she was first born... which were the scariest 3 minutes of my life! She stopped breathing a few times within her first 2 days outside the womb.)
• Work stress took a toll on me in my early 40s, and I was living on 2-4 hours of sleep per night. (It has taken changing jobs, therapy, medication for a while, trying different sleep supplements, learning mindfulness, and even changing my type of bed post-divorce...to a hammock.)
• • • On a side note, I was also prone to very vivid and pleasant dreams in my youth. So, it was understandable that I liked sleeping so much back then. I outgrew them, but now nearly 3 decades later, I miss that experience.
I was married for 20 years. My wife was a light sleeper, regularly getting only 5 hours of actual sleep per night. (She grew up in an abusive household, and basically learned to sleep being ready to wake up to any sign of a threat. It took over a decade of being married to a very non-threatening man (me) for her to sleep peacefully. She had to be very sick to sleep a full 7-8+ hours. {Speaking of threats and earthquakes... that's one guaranteed way to wake her up in a panic. It was a good thing for her that we moved away from southern California early in our marriage. She's characteristically a strong woman in many ways, but she has a few key phobias, and I'm sure they have all disrupted her sleep sometime in her life.}
***Example: heavy sleeper, then fast change to light sleeper***
Our oldest daughter (technically my stepdaughter, I've been her Dad since she was 7½, but I first met and have loved her since she was a baby)
• She was a very heavy sleeper when she was prepubescent. She regularly slept about 8-9 hours per night back then, and when she was out she was OUT! I mean that she was full dead-weight asleep, could sleep through any noise or even being shaken enough that almost anyone else would wake up.
• Then, she reached her teens, and almost overnight needed much less sleep (probably 6 hours on average, but she could function on much less), and started staying up reading, sneaking on the computer when she finally had one, or sneaking out after her mom and I were asleep. {She confessed her frequent sneaking out only after she was in her 20s. Oh my goodness, she was so sneaky that even her mom (who thinks a lot more like her than I do) only occasionally suspected it.}
Our older son/non-binary child [he/him, they/them], who is now 22:• Probably has fit with age stage sleep expectations. (Slept about 10+ hours per night as a young child, down to about 8-9 hours as a teen, then down to 7-8 hours per night as an adult. He/they did routinely sneak a Nintendo DS at night through high school years, caught by Mom the next day because they didn't put it away. He/they also have the most ADHD Inattentive traits, about as bad as mine, so I can totally understand the forgetfulness.)
Our younger son, now 11:
• Slept about 10 hours per night until about 7 or 8.
• Has had difficulty getting sleepy before about 10:30pm since then. (Still needs as much rest time, but not as much actual sleep.) He's typically wide awake before 6am at my house, which I'm sure is a trained response (since he said that at his mom's house, the cat hears his mom's alarm go off at 6 and then pounces on him).
Our youngest daughter, now 9:
• Still needs about 10 hours of sleep per night. Falls asleep within a few minutes of going to bed. Sometimes she sleeps as heavily as her eldest sister did.
• She still sometimes breathes so shallowly in her sleep (like when she was a baby) that when I check on her before I go to bed or after I wake up, I just have to check her color. (I've finally broken myself from the urge to look-listen-&feel, as first aid training taught me to check for breathing. It's been 9 years since the last time she stopped breathing, after all. Maybe I shouldn't panic so easily. But as they say, "old habits die hard".)
I've also recently learned that people tend to sleep in approximately 90-minute cycles (alternating from lighter sleep, to heavier sleep, back to lighter sleep)...followed by another cycle, and another, until the night is over. Interrupting sleep in the middle of a cycle is much harder than at the end.
~~~~~
Things you can try:
• Talk to you child inquisitively (but nonjudgmentally) about whether they have difficulty getting to sleep or waking up in the middle of the night
• Talk to your child's doctor
• Shift your child's bedtime a little earlier
• Make sure your child isn't using electronics for at least an hour before bedtime (the amount of time for this advice can vary) ~ For my younger son, I let him read with "warm" color light on, if he can't get to sleep; he sometimes also gets up and plays for a bit, then puts himself back to bed
• Try an age appropriate amount of melatonin (from what I've read, the advice is ½mg to 1mg for young children about 5-11 years old, 1-3mg for older children...when in doubt, ask your child's doctor, as the advice has changed over time)
If your child has any other mental health conditions (which is more common than not with ADHD), then if I were you, I would consider a possibility that their sleep is affected by it. (I'm a layman, so I would recommend talking to a child psychologist or therapy, if you want to look into that perspective.)
• I know that at times certainly 3 of my 4 kids have had their sleep disturbed by emotional issues, delaying when they fall asleep, thus making them need to sleep in later the next day. For over a decade now, I've been telling my kids that they have my open permission to wake me up at any time, even if it's just that they need someone to talk to because they have something stuck in their mind. (They wake me if they have nightmares or if they are feeling sick, but not for much else. But I know their mom and I are both prone to intrusive thoughts, so I'm sure that our kids will be more likely to experience the same thing.)
***** Wow, I guys I had a lot to say. I had to break this up into multiple replies! 😅*****
My son was also very hard to wake up in the morning. Before the take at night meds, we just used the fact my husband had to get up early anyway to medicate him at 5:00 am. He woke up everyday with his hand out lol. HS was easier for him when he had the medication on board to help.
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