Desperate dads meet in car parks to exchange packets; exhausted parents slip it into their kids’ drinks; families wait months for prescriptions buy it “off label.” But is it worth the risk?
“The first time I gave him a gummy, I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I killed him?’ He just passed out in front of the TV. That never happens.” Jen remembers giving her son, David, six, melatonin to help him sleep. She got them from a friend, a pediatrician who gave them to her own child.
“It was sort of hilarious. She had half a tub of gummies, and her husband met my husband in a car park near a roundabout to hand them over, like some underhand black-market deal.”
Photo: Reuters
The husbands weren’t breaking the law, exactly, but they were stepping into a legal gray area.
Melatonin is a synthetic version of the sleep hormone that occurs naturally in our bodies, rising at night in response to darkness to help us sleep. It isn’t strictly illegal in the UK — for children, it requires a prescription by a pediatrician under a specific set of circumstances, usually alongside a diagnosis of autism or ADHD. Side effects can include drowsiness the next day, nausea and feeling dizzy.
In other European countries, melatonin is far more accessible, often sold in pharmacies, though its use is limited to children with autism and ADHD. In the US, you can buy it in supermarkets; even from Amazon, often specifically targeted at children. Some gummies come in the shape of teddy bears or are marketed using cartoon characters. Nearly one in five US children under 14 are now consuming melatonin. In the UK, restrictions push British parents to look to the internet to purchase gummies, often with little medical oversight or supervision.
Photo: Freepik
David never slept, Jen says. Even as a newborn, he was unusually alert. Where other babies ate and slept, he ate and was awake, and never settled easily.
“People kept saying it will improve when he starts nursery, when he starts preschool. It never did. We just never had an evening. We’d be putting him to bed, sometimes, at 11pm or midnight.” David was also having massive meltdowns. Despite trying a calm bedtime routine, nothing seemed to be working, and it was taking a toll on the entire family. Jen was so exhausted she was forced to stop working completely.
As David grew, his parents started to suspect neurodivergence. At 18 months, he could count to 20 and do 30-piece jigsaw puzzles. An educational psychologist has recently confirmed that he is gifted to the extent that it will affect his life significantly, and he has been on the waiting list for an autism assessment for two years. When he was five, he was taken to see a pediatric consultant in the European country they were living in at the time.
Photo: Freepik
“I think my pineal gland’s broken,” David told the doctor, much to everyone’s astonishment. He was prescribed melatonin, and their lives changed for the better overnight. Had they been living in the UK at the time, they would almost certainly still be waiting.
NOT JUST A GUMMY
“Although people think of melatonin as a vitamin nowadays, it’s not. It’s actually a hormone that’s released by the pineal gland in the brain,” says Professor Paul Gringras, a sleep and neurodisability consultant at Evelina London Children’s Hospital, and president of the International Paediatric Sleep Association. “The pineal gland connects with all different parts of the body and helps synchronize all the cells in the body to keep our body clock going.”
David’s description of his pineal gland as “broken” was rather astute. Around 70 to 80 percent of children with autism and ADHD have sleep issues, far more than typically developing children, Gringas says.
“Some children with autism lack a gene that helps convert a chemical in the body called tryptophan into melatonin,” Gringras says. As for ADHD, those children do produce some melatonin, “but instead of it being the hormone of darkness, produced in the early evenings, they’re not producing it till way later, until two in the morning.”
These families need help. If their child’s sleep is being managed by professionals, their parents are less likely to get divorced, lose their jobs, crash the car or have an accident. Gringras is keen to emphasize that behavioral sleep programs can be transformative. In one sleep trial he ran, 50 percent of the severely autistic children who signed up didn’t need to take part in the medicated trial, because the behavioral strategies had been so successful. When he does prescribe melatonin, parents still need to keep the behavioral approach going so that they have learned new habits for when the melatonin stops working. What concerns him is the idea of melatonin as a sticking plaster.
“Many of the [pediatric] community are on their knees. They have massive waiting lists. They don’t have psychologists. And this is one of my really big worries, that it kind of becomes a quick fix... it’s faster to write a prescription, but it’s not correct.”
That is, of course, if you are even able to get hold of a prescription. Most parents interviewed didn’t have one. They were buying melatonin on the internet or abroad. All of them felt conflicted, uneasy, even scared of the consequences. Some were waiting for a diagnosis, while others suspected neurodivergence but hadn’t gone down that path yet.
DODGY DEALINGS
“It makes me feel like a drug dealer. It’s getting harder and harder to buy them,” says Charlotte, who, like Jen, has spent much of her child’s life enduring “endless evenings,” which she describes as “unbearable.” Her daughter, Edie, now 10, couldn’t sleep.
As a family, they tried everything. “We’d do bath time and lavender oil and reading a story and talking, and then we’d try leaving her on her own. Nothing worked.” They wondered quite early on if Edie had ADHD but didn’t pursue diagnosis.
They first started giving her melatonin when she was eight, when Charlotte’s sister-in-law, a doctor whose disabled daughter takes melatonin, gave her some to try. Charlotte was astonished — not only did Edie go to sleep at 8pm, but the effect on her behavior and mood was transformative. She started buying it online.
Charlotte thinks that Edie’s previously volatile behavior was directly linked to her sleep.
“The fact that she couldn’t sleep was a massive contributor to her feeling super stressed and highly sensitive,” Charlotte says. “When we started giving her melatonin, it got a lot better. Then last year, I ran out of melatonin.” It was like a switch flicked inside Edie’s brain. “She tried to run in front of a speeding lorry because she said everyone hated her. And then she started holding knives to her neck... I didn’t know what to do.” Charlotte ran to the doctor’s surgery.
“We went to see a counselor, and we borrowed some money to get her assessed. And it came back as not ADHD, but autism,” she says. She also had an emergency mental health appointment, but all they could offer a suicidal autistic child who struggles with groups was, astonishingly, group therapy nine months later.
“Then they said, ‘How is her sleep?’ And I said, ‘Well...’, and the woman said to me, ‘If you are about to tell me that you give your child unprescribed melatonin, I will have to report you to social services and they will take action.’”
Gringras is shocked when I tell him about the safeguarding threat made to Edie’s mum. But buying medication on the internet comes with risks. In the US, there has been a spike in child hospitalizations, with poison control centers seeing a 530 percent spike in reports of melatonin ingestion in children between 2012 and 2021 — and seven reported deaths since 2015, the youngest just two months old. Gringras points out that the lack of US regulation means there often isn’t dosage consistency across even a single jar of gummies.
All the parents I spoke to expressed unease, guilt and even fear at their decision to give their children melatonin bought online or abroad. Jen told me she was worried about being arrested, and, though the school is aware the family uses it, she would hesitate to mention it to a GP. Even parents who were giving melatonin under some degree of medical supervision, usually from a family member who works as a doctor, felt anxious. Doctors who give their own children melatonin bought online refused to go on the record for fear of professional consequences.
Although Edie now has an autism diagnosis, and Charlotte is finding it increasingly hard to get melatonin on the internet, the threat of a social services referral means she is now frightened to talk to a pediatrician about getting it prescribed officially. “The other day we had a hospital appointment. We were asked, does she take any medication? And I said no. And Edie looked at me and I just shook my head.”
NEUROTYPICAL USE
It’s not only parents of neurodivergent children who are turning to melatonin. One mother, Isobel, says she has used it a couple of times for overnight flights, having obtained it from an American relative.
Emily has been giving melatonin to her children, eight and four, for longer. She ordered some online, did a lot of research and says she kept an eye out for side-effects such as sleepwalking or drowsiness the next day.
Melatonin, Emily says, was “life-changing”. Emily then gave her oldest child a gummy every night for eight or nine months, but says she no longer needs it.
“I was really worried they’d get addicted to it, but it’s almost like the melatonin helped them form a new habit [of going to sleep at a decent time].” She now gives it to her youngest child, who, at four-and-a-half, developed similar sleeping issues. She has recommended it to a few parents she knows from school and some are also giving it to their children.
Ultimately, this is about crumbling services, leaving desperate parents and children chronically sleep-deprived without support. Were they to be given the help they need, they might not need the melatonin at all. And, by giving it without official medical oversight, how can the children be supported to taper off?
Gringras says we know “hardly anything” about the long-term effects of melatonin use.
“For children with autism, the best we’ve got is two years follow-up data... but if you said to me, well, do we know it’s safe over a five-year period? The answer is no, we don’t.” Gringras agrees that melatonin should only be prescribed by a specialist. It’s the wait for a diagnosis that is creating the biggest barrier.
It was concerns over the long-term effects – including claims that melatonin can interfere with or even delay puberty (something a 2020 study found no evidence of) — that stopped one mother, Helen, from continuing to administer it to her daughter. “It didn’t sit comfortably with me... I don’t really want to give my child something I don’t know is completely safe to take.”
Charlotte understands this viewpoint and shares many of the same feelings. Things had reached a point with Edie, however, where she could see no alternative. “I think it saved her life, ultimately, and saved our marriage and saved our family.”
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