For three exhausting years, Lauren Lockwood tried to get her son Rex to sleep through the night. As an infant, he couldn’t sleep without a blanket over his carrier to drown out the world around him. At age 2, it sometimes took hours for him — and her — to fall asleep, only for him to be jolted awake from night terrors that left him shrieking in panic.
In recent years, melatonin supplements have become an increasingly common child sleep aid that in the U.S. requires no prescription and is only lightly regulated by the FDA. Rishi attributes the recent increase in children’s use of melatonin in part to marketing efforts by supplement manufacturers, including products like gummies targeted specifically to children. But he also believes the pandemic has spawned a “growing epidemic of insomnia.”
“The next day he was a mess. We’d go into his room in the morning, and he was all crotchety,” said Kunishima, who lives in Oakland. Because melatonin is treated as a supplement in the U.S. — as opposed to a drug — the quality and dosage levels can vary widely.that tested 31 melatonin supplements found the actual melatonin levels ranged from less than a fifth to nearly five times the dosage listed on their labels. One in 4 of the products tested also contained serotonin, a hormone that can have serious side effects even at low doses.