Toilet Training for the Night

amother

Sun, Apr 11 2010, 11:38 pm

How do you train a child for the night? My DS is 4 years old. He goes to bathroom before going to bed and I usually take him again before I go to sleep. If I forget he gets up in middle of the night wet...Some nights even if I take him he wets again. Should I put him on a pull up for the night, but I am afraid if I do that, that he will make wet in it. How do I teach him the concept?

fiddle

Mon, Apr 12 2010, 2:02 am

what I did was wake up a few times at night and slowly cut back on times and slowly my dd learnt how to hold it in. I did it with day training, but only bc I noticed her diaper was dry in the morning. in the beginning we had a some accidents until I figured out the times but I basically got it right from the beginning. she went to sleep at six I woke her at 830 and took her, then at 12 than at 330 and then at 6. then I cut down to the 12 and the 6 and then the 6 and now none, and if she has to go to the bathroom, she feels it on her own. good luck. o an I did not use pullups, I got a waterproof mattress pad and put her on underwear. once she was out of diapers I want putting anything like them back on. but some kids to respond better with them, so you try and see.

RachelEve14

Mon, Apr 12 2010, 5:13 am

You can't "teach" the concept. Some bladdars are ready before others. One of my 6 year olds will wet at least 3x a week, the other one has been dry since before she was 3. My neighbor's ds still needs something at 11 years old, and once I told a babysitter to make sure R uses the toilet if she wakes up, and the babysitter said in her family it's genarally been a problem until around 10.

Marion

Mon, Apr 12 2010, 5:37 am

With my DS I find that if I don't put him in a Pull-Up he wakes up wet. If he's in a Pull-Up he wakes up dry. Go figure. I think it's psychological for him; he seems to need the feeling of being "contained". At the end of the current package I'm going to try moving him to regular underwear at night for the "containment" factor; I don't really like the principle of Pull-Ups. But just PJ bottoms don't seem to work for him.

Mommeeeeeeee!

Mon, Apr 12 2010, 11:55 am

What I learned, both from research and experience, is that there is a strong hereditary component to night training. Meaning, if neither of the parents wet the bed past the age of 4 or around half a year after they were fully day trained if it was later than that, then the vast majority of kids in such families will become dry at night on their own within a few months of being fully daytime trained, no intervention or wakeups necessary at all. Two exceptions: kids with physical, psychological/emotional, or developmental issues, and kids who are actually dry during sleep but then wet when they wake up (either during the night or in the morning) rather than get themselves to the toilet.
If either one of the parents had issues with bedwetting, there is a good chance the children will, too. The chance is even greater if both parents were bedwetters. Boys also have a greater likelihood of extended bedwetting than girls. For kids in these families who do wet the bed, no matter what you do, they probably will not learn to stay dry at night until the age at which their body is genetically programmed to be ready to do so. So you can wake the child up and take them to the toilet as much as you like, but they are not going to learn to hold it throughout the night or wake themselves up when they need to go until their bodies are good and ready, and there is really no effective way to speed up this process. Mostly, when people use whatever methods they are using to "night train", and then after a while the kid learns to keep dry without the help (wakeups, gadgets, alarms, natural products, medications, or whatnot), it's not because the method worked but more likely because at that point their body was ready and they would have been dry either way even without all that effort.