It’s 10:15 and your daughter is at the bedroom door again, asking for water. It’s her second glass tonight, and the first is still on her bedside table, half full.
She’s 9. Until the summer she was asleep by 8:30, and this has been going on since the second week of term.
Your husband thinks she’s settling into a new class. Your mother says you were exactly the same at her age, and she’d know. They may both be right.
About 1 in 7 people aged 10 to 19 live with a mental health condition, and the World Health Organization says these conditions go largely unrecognised and untreated. (WHO, September 2025)
Most of what worries parents does pass. The difficulty is that a phase and a problem look much the same in their first month, and nobody can tell which one it is from the bedroom door.
Telling the two apart is a large part of what Child and Adolescent Psychology does at The American Wellness Center in Dubai Healthcare City.
Phases and problems start the same way
Every family has a cousin who did exactly this at 9 and turned out fine. That comparison tells you very little.
Comparing her with herself last spring tells you far more. If she’s been a light sleeper since she was a baby, the water is probably just the water. But she slept through for eight years and stopped in September.
The National Institute of Mental Health puts the test in two parts. The signs last weeks or months, and they get in the way at home, at school or with friends. (NIMH, March 2024)
In most homes one parent sees it before the other. In a US poll about children’s health in general, 72% of mothers called children’s mental health a big problem, against 50% of fathers. (Mott Poll, August 2025)
the first conversation at home is an argument about whether there’s anything to talk about. A few questions settle more than that argument does:
- How long has this been going on
- Is it showing up in more than one place
- Has she stopped doing things she used to want to do
- Would she have done this last spring
At bedtime and at school
Sleep is the easiest change to explain away, usually as a new class or too much screen time before bed.
A UK study tracked children’s sleep from 6 months to age 7. Those who slept less than other children the whole way through had roughly double the odds of depression that persisted through adolescence. (European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, June 2026)
The researchers were careful about what that means. Only about 2% of children slept that little consistently, and the share who went on to persistent depression stayed small.
A bad term of sleep predicts very little by itself. Two bad terms predict a bit more.
School is where someone outside the family notices. Children in England with a mental health condition on their hospital records missed 16% of school sessions, against 6% for other children. (ONS and Loughborough University, September 2025)
For a lot of Dubai schools, the first parent teacher meetings fall around now. A teacher mentions she’s stopped putting her hand up, and on the drive home you realise she’s stopped talking about her friends at dinner too.
At 9 it can come out as temper. NIMH lists frequent tantrums, or being intensely irritable much of the time, among the signs to watch.
A 9 year old who snaps at her brother over the remote every evening may not have the words for anything else.
What an assessment looks like
A first appointment is mainly with the parents. The psychologist will want to know what changed and when, and whether it shows up anywhere besides bedtime.
Children her age tend to be seen through play. A 9 year old will show more with a box of figures than she’ll say across a desk, and with your permission the school may be asked how she seems in class.
If the picture needs more, AWC’s child psychologists can test for things like dyslexia or ADHD.
Plenty of children who need this never get it. In the US, 1 in 5 adolescents had mental health needs that went unmet in the past year. (CDC, NHIS Teen 2021 to 2023)
Sometimes the answer is that it’s a phase, with two or three things to change at home. That’s still worth the appointment, because the guessing stops.
After the second glass of water
She’ll probably be at the door again tomorrow, around 10:15.
She may be asleep by 8:30 again by the winter break. She may not.
Either way, the two things worth watching are how long it lasts and where else it shows up. Your mother’s memory of you at 9 can stay out of it.
If it’s still going on in December, or it has turned up at school as well, the child psychologists at The American Wellness Center in Dubai Healthcare City can help you work out which one it is.
Book a first session and bring what you’ve noticed since September, the two glasses of water included.
