Children and teenagers with anxiety disorders or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder also experience sleep problems, but of a different kind. Students with OCD may stay up late into the night working to get a paper "perfect," or may be so anxious about a school assignment that they can't get a good night's sleep. Other children and adolescents with OCD may have time-consuming rituals that they must engage in at night that prevent them from getting to sleep at a reasonable hour: toys must be lined up "just so," there may be extensive and time-consuming hygiene rituals instead of just being able to take a quick shower and get to bed, the bedding must be in a particular way, or they may have extensive "good night" rituals involving a parent. These are just some examples. 

Autism/Asperger's and Sleep Problems

Sleep problems have long been noted in autistic children, but the impression of the extent and nature of difficulties depends, in part, on what methodology the investigators use to study the problem. Of particular note for educators is a study by Elia et al. (2000), who found that some of the sleep measures were significantly correlated with the child's functioning. Nonverbal communication showed significant correlation with sleep period time, wakefulness after sleep onset, and total sleep time. Relating to people and activity level items were found to be significantly correlated with rapid eye movement density. 

In one of the larger studies using parental reports, Liu et al. (2007) studied 167 ASD children. They found that 86% of the children had at least one sleep problem almost every day. Problems included bedtime resistance (54%), insomnia (56%), parasomnias^** (53%), sleep disordered breathing (25%), morning rise problems (45%), and daytime sleepiness (31%).

A study of 52 children with Asperger's Syndrome also found sleep-related problems (Paavonen, Vehkalahti, et al., 2008). They found that problems with sleep onset and maintenance, sleep-related fears, negative attitudes toward sleeping, and daytime somnolence were more frequent among children with AS than among controls. Short sleep duration was approximately twice as common in Asperger's as in the control group, while the risk for sleep onset problems was five times as likely. Almost 60% of the children and teens with Asperger's had a sleep-related problem.