Is your child’s inner ear preventing them from sleeping through?

The inner ear houses the vestibular system, an intricate and complex series of canals, membranes and nerves that tells the brain how the body is moving. The vestibular system uses gravity to body detect movement. It basically keeps our balance to keep us safe from danger.

If your child’s vestibular system is off balance, in simple terms what happens is the vestibular system tells the brain an incorrect message. So the brain can detect danger, when no danger is present. This is usually due to an area of the body not moving efficiently, also called a lack of proprioception.

In practice, I have noticed a trend that one canal seems to be struggling to detect motion more than the others. In these cases, it means that whenever the body moves in the direction of the dysfunctional canal, the brain detects danger and the body goes into survival mode. You can imagine, if this happens a bunch of times during the day and overnight too, the brain is going to be in a constant state of stress. And we all know that stress in the body reduces sleep quality.

So if your child has vestibular dysfunction, each time they move their body in their sleep, if it’s in a direction that their body perceives as danger, they will wake up (in the primitive brain, they wake up because is there’s danger they need to survive by waking up and running away). Other signs your child has a vestibular imbalance include not liking swings, slides or activities in a certain direction, not being able to transfer from car to bed, or from your arms to the bed, as well as constantly needing to touch you all night to sleep (and waking the moment you move away from them). Older children with vestibular dysfunction may have had some relief with weighted blankets, and while these are great for symptomatic relief, they don’t remove the underlying dysfunction.