There is no one cure for bedwetting, no miracle pill that you can give your child, usually the best technique to stop bedwetting is time. However, there are a wide variety of tools and techniques that you can use in your own home with minimal fuss and expense to reduce the chances of a bedwetting incident. Often the best recourse is to implement some measures that have minimal impact of lowering your child’s self-esteem but maximum chances of reducing your child’s bedwetting. Below are a few of the most tried and tested techniques for reducing the frequency and severity of your child’s bedwetting.
Reduce Bedwetting Triggers
Stress can be one of the biggest triggers of bedwetting. Turmoil in the home, moving to a new city or a new brother and sister in the house are all things that might cause bedwetting in your child. Although you can’t eliminate stress completely, try to minimise the amount of stress that your child is exposed to in order to reduce the chances that bedwetting will occur. Surprisingly, minimising stress is usually best done through being open and honest with your kids. Kids are very sensitive to emotion, so chances are if you or your partner is feeling worried or stressed, the kids will also pick up on that. Having a family discussion over dinner or breakfast can help put everyone at ease by bringing out in the open what may be concerning to you or your partner. Kids can also have lots of stress at school, either from friends, teachers or workload. Regular catch ups with teachers and other school parents can help you get an inside view into what is happening while you’re not around and is likely to help you relate to their troubles. Having a parent that is aware of the troubles at school is soothing for a child, even though often enough we won’t be able to fight their battles for them.
Behavioural Therapies for Bedwetting
Visualisation is a powerful tool for you in your efforts to reduce your child’s bedwetting. This mental technique is used by millions of people worldwide and is simple enough for your child to do, if you guide him/her through it. Get your child to lie down and relax, then ask your child to imagine they are in their bed, asleep and staying completely dry through the whole night. This can help the body accept the mind’s visual cues as reality.
Lifting is a commonly used technique that you can do very simply at home. Lifting entails waking your child up at different intervals during the night and taking them to use the toilet. Eventually a connection between needing to use the toilet and being woken is established and hopefully your child’s mind learns to wake up on its own to go to the bathroom. If this technique seems to work, stretch out the intervals between waking your child until your child can go the whole night without wetting the bed. This also means that you can get back to getting a full night’s sleep without any urine filled interruptions.
Motivational programs have the roots in the fact that kids wake up more easily when the day ahead has some kind of reward, i.e. it’s easier for a child to wake up on Easter than a school day. You can create a similar kind of excitement by creating a star chart where your child gets stars for the nights when he remains dry. After a specified amount of stars get your child a nice present, a little reward goes a long way.
Practical Bedwetting Considerations
Using products like DryNites Pyjama Pants can help your child sleep through the night and not experience any embarrassing bedwetting incidents in front of their friends. Ensure your child goes to the bathroom right before bed so his bladder is empty for the start of the night. Get a waterproof mattress protector so that bedwetting doesn’t damage the bed. Try to make sure that your child doesn’t drink too much in the 2 hours before bed to limit his/her bedwetting. Put clean clothes and sheets next to the bed so that your child can change if he/she wets the bed.
