8 1/2 year old's sleep problem

[NandN]

My son who is 8 1/2 reluctantly sleeps in his own room.
Most of the days he wakes up and starts crying as he unable to
go back to sleep. He says he is scared and wants to come into
bed with us. He says he is scared of something he saw on tv,
something in the book he is reading etc.His 4 year old sister sleeps with us. Anytime there is another person sleeping in the same room, he is fine. Is this normal.

[Kevin Kennedy, Ph.D.]

Children of your son's age are generally well able to sleep in their own room, by themselves, without any regular difficulty. The stated fears are likely exaggerations designed to influence you to let him sleep with you, and the fact that his sister actually does this probably exacerbates the problem: what's good (in this case) for the gander is good for the goose! It would be perfectly reasonable to insist that both children sleep in their own beds.

[Mike]

I can relate a story about our 4 year old.  We were having behavioral problems and thought him to be ADHD (brother and dad are).  After a failed attempt at stimulate-based medication we turned a very good psychiatrist and he quickly homed in the fact that we could count the number of times he sleep through the night on one hand and that he probably had delayed development due to anxiety.  At the time, his favorite nightly action was to sneek into our bed in the middle of the night without waking us up.  The psychiatrist instructed us to fix this problem because 'a child sleeping through the night is critical mental developmental milestone.  He needs to be able wake up in the night, picture in his mind that all is ok and that mom and dad are just down the hall and return to sleep.  He must use his imagination to tell himself it is ok.  If he is not made to do this the ability to create safe, non-threatening images in the mind will be delayed and he may experience ongoing anxiety.'  He recommended locking our bedroom door or putting a motion-detector device somewhere so we would wake up when he did this.  My wife did not like these ideas.  What we did do was when we found him in our bed that night I woke him up and made him walk back to his room under his own power.  Previously, I would carry him back without waking him up.  After 4 nights of forced march back to his bed he was sleeping through the night or a least staying in his own room through the night since he figured out he was not welcome in our room. His behavior problems started improving rapidly.  

Obviously your son feels safe when he sees another person in the room but he needs to be able to imagine that all is ok also.  The anxiety may be delayed development in this area.  So the not sleeping through the night might be a cause of the anxiety and not vis-versa. Also if your daughter is sleeping in your room or her brothers she might expirience the same problem when forced to sleep in a room alone.