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[quote=Anonymous]OP, I totally sympathize. We've been in a similar place for the past few months. My son turned 2yo in january and he began banging his head incessantly at about 22 months. He would do it during the daytime when he got frustrated, and then also at night, both to get himself to sleep and in the middle of the night (sometimes for hours). He would even pull himself up during naps at daycare, bang his head on the wall, and then go back to sleep. He had a giant horrible bruised goose egg on his forehead practically from Thanksgiving to New Years. I posted on this forum a few times in December and got a lot of really great advice. We also did a bunch of consults, including a neurologist and early intervention, and they ruled out the obvious concern (autism) and just about everything else.

What made a big difference for my son was ear tubes - he got them in late December, and it is like night and day. He still does the head banging, although less forcefully and sort of deliberately, like he wants to be stopped. (He also will sometimes hit himself in the head with his hands, or headbutt me when I'm holding him, which is really painful and makes me feel even worse about the fact that he does this to himself deliberately.) The tubes have also helped a ton with his speech, which is helping with tantrums or frustration -- at least now he can say what he wants rather just finding a wall or the floor to bang his head on. BTW I don't mean to suggest that ear tubes would be a solution for you. I believe all the doctors and experts we talked to who said that some kids do this as a self-soothing mechanism, which would explain why my son still does it even though it seems to have been provoked initially by the fluid in his ears. There are still times when my son wakes up at night for some reason and it's almost like he can't sleep without one good whack of his head - I've learned not to grab him until he goes for a second one. BTW we also toyed with moving him to a bed, but he treated it like a trampoline, so I'm going to try again at 2.5 years.

One last thing - I just want to say that I get how insane this makes a parent, and beyond that I now have even more incredible sympathy and respect for people who are dealing with really serious developmental issues. I barely slept when his headbanging was really bad, and we never left him with a babysitter for months. My whole life was hostage to his headbanging. So I hope you find something that helps. Good luck![/quote]

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