- Posted April 14, 2026
Does Your Child Have Nightmares? Here's One Solution
Nightmares can be terrifying for children, robbing them of precious sleep and feeding their everyday anxiety.
But a new therapeutic model promises to help these children by empowering them to defeat their own nightmares, researchers recently reported in the journal Frontiers In Sleep.
The model, called DARC-NESS, teaches kids the skills they need to rid themselves of nightmares and restore good sleep, researchers said.
“The DARC-NESS model looks at the mechanisms of what is maintaining nightmares, as well as the mechanisms that can break the cycle of nightmares,” said lead researcher Lisa Cromer, a professor of psychology at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.
“It’s a child’s response to a nightmare that causes the chronic nightmares to happen, which means if we can learn to respond to nightmares differently, then we can interrupt that cycle,” Cromer said in a news release. “It’s empowering to understand that we can take steps to master our dreams.”
Insomnia causes people to fear they won’t sleep. Children with chronic nightmares have the opposite problem, researchers say — they are afraid they will sleep, and then the nightmares will come.
Under the new approach, therapists consider more than just the nightmare itself. Children are asked about their interpretation of the nightmare, their worries about going to sleep and how they cope after waking.
Based on what they learn, the therapist then can craft a personalized treatment plan, researchers said.
Some kids might need help reducing their anxiety as bedtime approaches, while others might benefit from improving their sleep hygiene, researchers said.
Kids also might engage in exposure-based therapy – describing, writing about or drawing their nightmare, then talking with their therapist about how it might be rewritten in their minds.
“We believe we have created a way to conceptualize why nightmares persist and how we can better treat them in kids,” senior researcher Dr. Tara Buck, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Oklahoma, said in a news release.
“What’s unique about the model is that it’s customizable to what the patient needs, and it focuses on what the patient can control,” she said. “We look for the potential intervention points and target those in a collaborative way with patients and their families.”
Further, building children’s confidence in their ability to handle their nightmares can provide benefits far beyond improving their sleep, Buck said.
“Self-efficacy is at the heart of the model,” she said. “When children feel empowered to do something about the nightmares, they begin to see how things are interconnected – because they’re sleeping better, they have more energy, they go to school more consistently and their parents report improved behavior.”
In the past, doctors have assumed that either nightmares can’t be treated, or that they would go away if an underlying trauma or mental health condition is addressed, researchers said.
“We’ve worked with children who have been in mental health treatment for a long time and their nightmares are still persistent,” Buck said. “There is a need for a nightmare treatment model to help children when their nightmares are recurrent and distressing.”
More information
The American Board of Professional Psychology has more on therapy for nightmares.
SOURCE: University of Oklahoma, news release, April 9, 2026
