Bed-Wetting
Most young children who are fully toilet trained during the day, will naturally stop wetting the bed by around the age of 5. Still, there are many children who will continue to have nighttime accidents after the age of 5. This is usually not a cause for concern. However, if your child is wetting the bed every night after the age of 5, it could be a sign of a medical problem. For this reason, we suggest that you tell your child’s pediatrician that she is continuing to have accidents while asleep. There are a few different things that you can do to help your child to stay dry through the night. We will discuss a few of them here briefly.
General Tips on Preventing Bed-Wetting
The first thing to try is to limit your child’s intake of liquids after dinner. Of course, it’s important that children get enough liquids. So be sure to give your child plenty of liquids during the day and at dinner time. After dinner try to limit your child’s intake of liquids to a few sips. Eliminate all carbonated drinks from late afternoon on. Carbonated beverages tend to irritate the bladder.
Try to make sure that your child urinates just before going to bed. Some parents have had success waking their children before they themselves go to sleep. They will walk or carry the child quietly to the bathroom and have them urinate in the toilet. Then they should return to bed right away. It’s important to keep the lights dim and your voice quiet and soothing so that your child doesn’t become too excited to fall back to sleep easily.
Try Waking Your Child a Little Earlier Than Usual
Another idea is to wake your child earlier than she normally wakes in the morning. This is to try getting to the toilet before an accident. If you do not normally wake before your child, set your alarm clock for one hour before her usual waking time. Check quietly to see if your child is wet. If she has already had an accident, allow your child to sleep until her usual waking time. Then try setting your alarm 15 to 30 minutes earlier the next day to see if you can identify the time she tends to have accidents.
If she is not wet when you check her, wake her gently and bring her to the toilet. Once she empties her bladder, hopefully you can both get back to sleep! In any case, if this works, you should do this for a week or two. Then try setting your alarm for about 10 minutes later each morning. See if she will begin either to hold her urine longer or to wake on her own when her bladder is full.
The Urine Alarm or “Bell & Pad” Approach
Another idea is to use a urine alarm device. These are available online and in some pharmacies. They have a very sensitive moisture sensor that is placed in the underpants. The sensor is connected, either by a wire or wireless signal, to an alarm. The alarm is either clipped to the pajamas or placed on the bedside table. Some of the alarms also vibrate when triggered to help wake the child. When placed correctly, the sensor should detect moisture at the very beginning of urination. The alarm then goes off, giving the child the chance to wake and stop the urine stream. With luck, she can get to the bathroom, and finish emptying her bladder into the toilet. Over a period of days to weeks, the child begins to associate the sensation of a full bladder with the sound of the alarm. When this happens, she will start to wake on her own, before she begins to urinate.
When to be Concerned about Bed-Wetting
Finally, as we said, bed-wetting is quite common in young children. In rare cases it can be a symptom of a medical problem. If your child’s bed-wetting continues, be sure to discuss this with her doctor. You can find more information on bed-wetting, including other treatment methods, online. The Mayo Clinic website has a good web page on bed-wetting.
We have covered a lot of information about daytime toilet training. We have also shared a few ideas about the prevention and treatment of bed-wetting. Now we are going to ask you to answer some questions about what you have learned. Some of the questions will have choices, some will be true or false questions, and some will be fill-in-the-blank questions. A good way to work on these questions is to pause after reading each one. Think about the answer, make your best guess and then read on to see the answer. There will be 10 questions. If you answer all of the questions correctly, you are probably ready to try out some of the suggestions in this section. But, if some of the questions were difficult for you, or, if you feel reading parts of this module again before working on toilet training with your child might be helpful, please do. It might be especially helpful to review the discussion of Daytime Urine Training Part 1 a few times before beginning this with your child. Then, as you go along, you can do the same with Daytime Urine Training Part 2 and later with bowel training.