A Bedwetting Child
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Bedwetting is a common theme in young children. Usually it is associated with toilet training, but what happens when it continues beyond the "normal" ranges of time?
It could be a sign of an illness, such as diabetes, or of a too-small bladder. The first obvious courses of action are to take the child to the doctor and have screenings done, and limit fluids after a certain time at night. Sometimes this doesn't work, however.
Many parents try getting their child up at night to go to the toilet. My own parents did this with me. However it doesn't always work, either.
There may be a mental issue behind the bedwetting, also called nocturia in the medical sphere. I'd recommend taking your child to a community mental health clinic to see if there is something going on, for instance bullying at school or a babysitter doing "bad things" to the child. Some forms of mental disorders such as depression can cause bedwetting to occur, as can any number of others, including mild mental handicaps that haven't shown up on standard testing yet.
However, in some cases, the problem is not physical or mental. Sometimes it just happens.
I was bedwetting until I was over twelve years old, and no one knew why. Suddenly it stopped and I have not wet the bed in the eight years since, except when I have been very sick or, once, when I had been drinking a little more alcohol than I should have the night before.
I know someone else who wet the bed until age 18. It wasn't a nightly occurrence, and it happened more when the person was away from home than at home. When this person started masturbating and had their first orgasm, the bedwetting suddenly stopped and has not happened at all in the six years since.
So the easiest way to deal with bedwetting is to get rid of nighttime pullups and put a plastic sheet on the bed, underneath the cotton ones. If there are no physical or mental problems causing the bedwetting, it should fix itself in time. Either it will suddenly stop when the child's bladder and the related muscles mature, or it will stop when the child has otherwise triggered a change.
The most important thing to remember, regardless of the cause of bedwetting, is to take a positive attitude and do not demean your child. It is not a behaviour that can be controlled. praise dry nights and let your child know that you still love them when a wet night does occur. A happy child will wet the bed less often, even if it does still happen every so often.
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Comments
It's true. My parents made bedwetting into a secret shame for me as a child, and it happened more often when I got yelled at for making another load of wet sheets to be washed. When I got old enough to know how to hide wet sheets until laundry day, the yelling stopped, the bedwetting began to cease, and eventually I grew out of it. Go figure. I think the only reason I continued for so long was because I was always dwelling on the fact that it happened, and the shame that my father made me feel whenever I woke up with a wet bed. (To be fair, my mother was not much better, but she at least never yelled and threatened humiliating punishments if I wet the bed again...telling your child you will call her 4th grade teacher and tell her to tell the whole class on the first day of school or that you will throw the wet sheets on the lawn is not the way to stop bedwetting, I promise those sheets will be twice as wet the next morning!)
Dame Scribe says:
5 months ago
Bedwetting isn't anything that should cause shame as it's common across all cultures and eventually overcome. Good article! :)