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Having a healthy bladder can help to manage your child’s bedwetting. Read on for more tips on how to help maintain a healthy bladder in your child.

• Ensure your child has 6-8 drinks each day. Preferably water or milk. Limit sweet and bubbly drinks, especially ones containing caffeine such as cola and chocolate.
• Encourage drinks (mainly water) at regular intervals during the day, spread it out evenly.
• Don’t restrict fluids in the late afternoon or evening. Encourage your child to drink throughout the day.
• Avoid dairy products at night until the nocturnal enuresis subsides then gradually increase these products back into diet. These include Dairy products such as milk, ice cream, cheese, puddings with dairy products etc
• Avoid citrus juices late in the day/early evening as the citric acids can aggravate the bladder contributing to urinary nocturnal enuresis.
• Stop “just in case” visits to the toilet (i.e. before going out). Contrary to popular belief, it is good for children to ‘hold on’ so the bladder learns to store larger amounts of urine.
• Prevent constipation and straining as this can affect how the bladder functions. Increase fibre, vegetables and fruits.
• Don’t lift children when asleep to take them to the toilet when you go to bed or during the night. This may slow the development of the bladder/brain connection in your child.
• Encourage your child to be active and healthy. Exercising has benefits for all parts of their life.
• Provide a well balanced and healthy diet for your children.

Tips for increasing bladder capacity

1. It’s good to have a starting point. So being able to measure your child’s current output is a good place to start. Buy a cheap, large, plastic measuring jug that you keep just for this. Do this over a couple of days so that you get a good idea of their general output.
2. Ask them to hang on for as long as possible and get them to wee into the jug.
3. A good bladder capacity for a child would be around 200-300 ml.
4. If it’s less than this it would be a good idea to start trying to increase their ability to hold on. Check with your doctor before commencing any bladder programs.

Getting started

1. Buy a few of drink bottles, say three 500ml bottles, and fill them up at the beginning of each day. Ensure that they drink this through out the day so you can measure how much fluid they are taking.
2. Do not keep asking them if they need to go to the toilet. Encourage them to ‘hang on’ for as long as possible before doing a wee.
3. Of course, don’t prevent them from going to the toilet as having a daytime accident may cause them some emotional distress.
4. A child holds on in the same way as an adult, by using their pelvic floor muscles. This can be a bit hard to explain to a child. One way of describing it could be about controlling the passing of wind.
5. Continue to measure the amount of wee each time over about 5-7 days, so you can see if there has been any improvement.
6. You may find that a reward system works well while you work through this. Depending on the age of your child it could be as simple as stickers or there may be some tangible reward like a new book or a special event.
7. If you don’t see any improvement in the early days, don’t be disheartened. It can take a while for a child to get this right. However if your child does not improve after 5-7 days, it’s probably a good idea to see your family doctor.