by Debbie Todd

Created on: January 08, 2010

My youngest daughter regularly wet the bed until she was about 7 years old.  At the time, I lived in rented accommodation (the beds belonged to me) without a garden so my washing line was strung up on a flat roof which I accessed by climbing out of the bathroom window.  Although others around me seemed to see this as a huge problem (especially in terms of the extra work involved for me with all the washing generated), I tried never to see it as a problem myself.  

I made sure that I had really good rubber sheets to protect the mattress which I found an invaluable help.  It's much easier to deal with wet sheets than a wet mattress.  Whenever she wet the bed, I would just get up and change the bed, change her pyjamas and then settle her back down.  

I always made sure to decrease the amount of drinks she had in the couple of hours before bedtime and also to make sure that she had been to the toilet before bed, but this made no difference.  I didn't seek medical advice for this and never let my daughter think that I vewed this as a problem.  I honestly thought that putting her under stress by focusing on the bed-wetting too much would probably make it worse rather than better. 

I found the easiest way to deal with the problem was to make sure that I was well-organised enough to be able to change the bed and pyjamas with minimum fuss so that she would not feel so bad about wetting the bed.  I had loads of second-hand sheets and duvet covers donated by family members and made sure that she had plenty of pyjamas.  I would be washing her bedding most days of the week for several years and drying the bedding often presented problems (especially on my rooftop drying space which was surrounded by other buildings and did not get much wind!).  

Whenever she woke me to say that she had wet the bed, I made sure that I never moaned about it in any way.  I would just get out of bed, tell her "Never mind, I'll sort out your bed and pyjamas and then you can get back to sleep".  This attitude seemed to work.  She never became hung-up about the situation and gradually, the bed-wetting became more and more infrequent and stopped totally during her seventh year.

I have spoken to other parents of children who were regular bed-wetters.  I have noticed that the more fuss that is made of the situation, and the more the parent tries to "solve the problem", the longer the bed-wetting seems to go on.  Because my daughter never thought that I viewed it as a problem, I just accepted it as part of life, I'm sure that it helped to stop her bed-wetting earlier than it would have stopped otherwise.

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