It’s frustrating to make it all the way through potty training with apparent ease, only to be knocked down by the kids who won’t stay dry at night. I know, I know—you’re thinking “God Lord, how long will this go on?”
Let me see if I can offer some advice to help you regain your sanity and give you some practical survival tips for this last haul in the training journey.
It’s common for five year-olds to still be wet at night. By age six, about 90% of children will be dry at night. Because there is always that small percentage that are late trainers, your doctor will probably not be concerned until about age seven. Many people won’t remember how old we were when we were trained, but will remember their childhood hassles of wetting the bed and subsequent embarrassment. It turns out that there’s a hormone to blame—it slows down the kidney at night so you make less urine when you’re sleeping. For some people, that hormone doesn’t appear until around seven.
If the doctor has ruled out a physical problem (and yes, there are a host of problems that can lead to night bedwetting, but I won’t get you all freaked out about that) then you can begin to work on dealing with a nighttime action plan:
- Show emotional support. Many children are ashamed they are wetting the bed at night. Be empathetic to their embarrassment and help them understand. Never shame a child or call them a baby.
- Normalize and educate your kids. Explain that it takes time for the body to develop. Remind them about how they learned not to fall off the bed. Soon, their bodies will feel the sensations of needing to pee in the night and will tell the brain to wake up and pee. Right now their bodies are only whispering and the brain is not hearing the signals, but it will. Be patient.
- Reduce fluids in the evening. It helpful to reduce the amount of liquids your child drinks in the evening. No drinks after supper can be a house policy. Be sure they get lots of fluids in before supper though. Dehydration is NOT the answer.
- Don’t wake them to pee. Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes parents make is waking their children to pee when turning in for the night. It may be an attempt to help them make it through the night dry, but actually it interferes in the learning process. We want children to pay attention to their body signals. When parents wake them, the child doesn’t get the chance to listen to those signals, and this becomes a crutch for them. If you want to get that bladder drained, do it while they are awake. Have them use the toilet at the start of tuck-ins and then again right before lights out.
- Avoid hidden benefits. Some children discover that if they wet the bed, they get attention from Mom or Dad while their siblings are sleeping. In an exhausted haze, a parent may just opt to have the child tuck in with them and deal with bed sheets in the morning. To avoid hidden benefits, keep your night time interactions to a minimum, and if possible, train your child to deal with the nighttime wet waking independently. Consider keeping a sleeping bag in their room. Explain that if they wake up wet, they can get out of wet jammies, use a diaper wipe for a quick clean up, and then crawl in to the bag on the floor. You can then deal with the bed in the morning. No Mom or Dad required. Alternatively, buy extra plastic sheets and layer the bed: one sheet, one plastic, another sheet, another plastic etc., so that if they wet the bed, they can independently peel off a layer and crawl into the dry bed and continue sleeping without disturbing others in the house.
- Add a hassle. Not only can your child strip their sheets independently, now is also a good time to show them how to use the washing machine and how to make a bed. As they gain skills, they can do the chore themselves (and it can get pretty dull pretty quickly). This is not really meant to be a ‘punishment’ so much as tying together responsibility for themselves. The burden of the clean up stays with the person who made the mess; just like when you spill a box of crayons.
- Teach tricks to ease social stigmas. Many kids have to continue with pull ups at night and it’s hard on them socially. If they are going to overnight camp or sleepovers, spend some time practicing how to pre-place their pull ups in their PJ’s and roll them up so they stay in place. This way they can slip into them at the same time as their PJ bottoms, so no one notices.
Have patience. It will take time, and if it takes too long, speak to your doctor for recommendations (there are medications, bedwetting ‘alarms’ and more) but hopefully the other steps will lead to success first. Good luck—and may the mattress protectors be with you.
Eat… sit… and be merry.
Yes, it’s that time of year when we gather around the table and enjoy holiday dinner with our extended family. Joy right? Ahh, not so much, especially if you are stressed about your uncouth seven year-old son’s behaviour. Will he break bread or break wind, or worse, toss bread? Or pout about hating his gravy touching his peas. Shouting “Where are your manners?” is just as much a part of the festive meal as the cranberry sauce.
We forget our children have substandard table manners until they’re under scrutiny of company and extended family. Suddenly we think that a stern look or a quiet reminder is somehow going to snap them into shape like yet another Christmas miracle.
We have to invest some time BEFORE the holidays to prepare our kids for the ways we expect them to behave when we have company. Here is my quickie table manners course:
Alyson’s Table Manners Bootcamp
- Don’t teach table manners during the special occasions. Instead, have some ‘fancy’ family dinners together in the dinner room with china, crystal, and gravy boats on a Sunday night. Get dressed up. Make it over-the-top fun, like you’re actors in a play. “Pardon me Jeeves, but would you care for some more water with lime in your goblet?”
- Teach instead of correct. Discuss manners in a relaxed ‘did you know’ way. Usually we just correct children for their mistakes which they hear as criticism. “Your bread plate is the one on the left” is nicer than “Hey, that’s not your plate, use the other one”.
- Explain that there are different levels of manners. These are based on the formality of the occasion. It may be okay to skip the napkin when you are eating grilled cheese for lunch, but Christmas dinner means you need to put the cloth napkin on your lap. Discuss this BEFORE company arrives. If you don’t, your children will think you are inconsistent and are just making up different rules all the time.
Create a list of misbehaviours (privately) that you specifically want to parent around and tackle them NOW. Three common ones and their solutions are:
- Interrupting while others are speaking. Try passing around the salt shaker, and whoever has it has the floor and can speak while others listen. You may also need to bring a timer from a board game to the table to make sure no-one fillabusts longer than three minutes.
- Getting up and down from the table. Try applying a logical consequence: “If you get up from the table, that tells me you are done the meal”. If your child opts to leave the table, so be it. Quietly and calmly remove their plate, and don’t offer alternative food until the next meal time. They’ll soon learn to stay at the table and eat enough to fill their tummy.
- Disturbing by bubbling milk and other hijinks. Most dinner disturbances serve to keep the limelight on the child. Instead of responding to misbehaviors with nagging and reminding, ignore poor manners and use distraction to engage the child in a more positive conversation. Ask them about their favorite superhero, or what they want to be when they grow up.
If your children don’t use their manners, you can excuse them from the table and invite them to come back when they do want to use their manners. Or you can excuse yourself and choose to eat in the kitchen where you don’t have to watch poor table manners.
Try some of these in the weeks to come BEFORE the big holiday feast with family. And when in doubt, you can always have the kids and cousins eat at a card table in the basement!
