Desperate - Page 2

[wednesday]

Originally Posted by Aridel

FWIW, medication can be a lifesaver. It's not always the answer, but for some kids it can really turn things around. A child who is always on the edge of a meltdown isn't able to learn coping skills or alternative ways of acting, and sometimes using medication to help them control themselves brings the kiddo to a point where they can work on those strategies.

That is exactly how it worked out for us.

desperate, I'm curious about the dose of melatonin your son is on. We also use melatonin with our ds to help him feel sleepy, but after some experimentation and reading around online, we found that it took a surprisingly small dose to get the benefit. Larger doses can make things worse for some kids during the day following, but it's not always easy to make the connection. My DS takes 1/2 mg every night. If we give him more he tends to be more disruptive the following day and to also have kind of a crash after lunch. He was even falling asleep at his desk at school! Other parents have reported nightmares or more aggressive behavior during the day after using melatonin. The standard tablets in drugstores are often 3 or 5 mg, and even the medical literature talks about giving kids as much as 10 mg, but anecdotally it seems like that may be far more than is needed. Just something to think about! We buy 1-mg dissolvable tablets from our HFS and they snap in half easily, so that he only get 1/2 mg per night.

[Guest Mama10]

He takes a time-release 1mg capsule. For the first couple of nights he had night terrors, so we only gave him half a capsule. Then maybe a year ago the half dose didn't last the whole night, so we upped him back on the full 1mg.

[wednesday]

Interesting...we tried the 1-mg time-release capsule ourselves but felt it was affecting his daytime behavior negatively. We didn't notice it much at home but all of a sudden at school his teachers were reporting difficulty, when he had otherwise been doing well prior to that. They kept asking if I was getting him to bed early enough, or what else was going on that could be affecting him. He was just that little bit extra cranky, sensitive to too much stimulation, and resisting doing his work. Then I read on another site about too much melatonin possibly causing lingering effects. We dropped the time-release and went to the 1/2 mg of regular melatonin and that seemed to be the right balance for him.