Dreaming of Dry Nights

A couple of months ago I celebrated that my days of surfing the Web for “potty training” expertise were over. And yet there I was yesterday, back online, googling “bed wetting” info. My 3-year-old can go quite some time without incident, and then boom! We have a night like Thursday, when I’m changing the bedding twice in one night for no apparent reason.

Because he’s 3, I’m not worried. And he’s not worried, which the experts say is the main thing parents need to watch out for: Be sensitive to the child’s feelings and don’t shame him for bed-wetting. So we keep our frustration to ourselves and try to be proactive by limiting liquids in the evening and waking him up to use the bathroom right before we go to bed. He’s perfectly willing to do this. And once – one happy, happy night – he actually woke me up to say he had to go potty.

But even though I won’t start to worry until he’s one of the 20 percent of kids who still wet the bed at age 5 (which drops to 13 percent at age 6 and 5 percent at age 10), I’m still looking for tips on ways to speed up his normal development out of enuresis (the medical term). One I haven’t tried yet but that may be promising is moving his bedtime up by half an hour, so he’s not quite so dead-to-the-world tired, and thus will be more likely to wake up when he feels the urge to go.

So browsing the Web at sites like WebMD has been a little reassuring. And I’ve heard from countless parents at work, at the gym and at school about how their child wet the bed forever until they used a bed-wetting alarm, medication, etc. Then there are those who’re convinced that potty training their child at like 17 months or something crazy early like that was the magic age, and that I’m done for because my son wasn’t fully out of diapers until 42 months. In fact, the “magic age” for starting potty training is between 24 and 32 months, according to a study published in the Journal of Pediatric Urology. Children who started then were less likely to have future bed-wetting and other problems. The key word, of course, is START – you can still have a kid wearing diapers for nearly a year, as ours was, and it's perfectly normal.