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A Good Attitude Can Help with Bedwetting

If your child is wetting the bed, how you approach the problem can make all the difference in the world in how easy the problem is to solve. When your toddler wets the bed, while they may feel embarrassed, treat the incident like any other accident: in a matter of fact way, clean up first your child, then the bed. Encourage them to think positively and visualize a time when this won’t happen.

As a safeguard to protect their mattress from staining, put a rubber sheet on their mattress, under the mattress pad and regular sheets. Do not yell at or punish your child for wetting the bed, often they have no control over what their body does at night. Causing your child to become overly anxious about wetting the bed may cause them to sleep less well, which may lead to increased bedwetting. Instead, praise your child when the bed is dry in the morning.

If someone in your family had bed wetting problems, you may wish to tell your child this story, to make them feel more comfortable about themselves. Of course, it may also be embarrassing if your child chooses to share this story at the next family reunion.

Regardless, reassure your child that this problem will go away as time passes, and that many children wet the bed. Do not run out and buy every single product on the market that promises to help your child stop bedwetting – your child will gain the impression that this is so important to you that you’ll stop at nothing to end the bedwetting. Instead, form a plan from the available methods to help your child stop bedwetting and follow the plan until it does or doesn’t work, or you see signs of a medical problem.

Remember that this will most likely just be a matter of time. Even if your child has secondary enuresis and you have removed the stress and gone to therapy, it can still take time for your child’s sleep and bathroom habits to resettle, and thus for bedwetting to end. Give it time and patience, and you will get past this phase easily.

Basically:

DO...
• Be patient
• Clean up messes quickly, and if your toddler is older, have them help clean up, before washing hands thoroughly
• On toddlers, using pull up diapers until they are ready to go the night without a diaper may make life easier
• Put a rubber sheet on the bed
• Realize that this is just a phase, and your child will grow out of this
• Be flexible
• Talk to your child about how the bladder works

DON’T...
• Yell at your child
• Make them feel embarrassed or feel that bedwetting only happens to babies; it’s quite common in toddlers and happens to a lot of children as well