Dana Obleman: Hi. I’m Dana Obleman. Welcome to this week’s video blog. Today I wanted to talk a little bit about bed wetting. I know when people start potty training, most people understand, that the nighttime potty training is usually the last thing that comes.

I hear a lot and I get emails a lot about people who are a bit concerned that their child’s not really getting the hang of staying dry through the night.
I just want to address a few things to be looking for, what to watch for in your child and just to put your mind at ease that for a lot of children learning to control their bodily functions through the night can be a really hard process for a lot of children.

In fact when I was teaching Grade 1, there were always a couple of children who would confide in me that they still had issues with wetting the bed at night. That’s more biology than anything else.

If you have a child who is pushing into the school aged years, it’s a good idea to run this idea by your doctor and get a second opinion. The doctor can start looking out for maybe some underlying causes why your child’s not really catching those signals.

When we’re talking about children who are just starting out learning to potty train, I always recommend that for the first two months you just put them in a nighttime pull up. You don’t really pay a lot of attention to what’s going on through the night.

Most of the time I’d say 9 times out of 10 you’re going to find that within a couple of months your child is having a dry pull up in the morning and to really celebrate that. That’s a huge accomplishment.

If for a couple of days in a row your little guy is producing a dry pull up in the morning, then have a celebration about that. Let him call maybe grandma to brag about his accomplishment.

You might even do a little celebration breakfast or something along those lines. Then let him follow through with that by not having to wear a pull up any more.

You would just put him in bed in his underwear and really encourage him that he can do this. That everything’s going to be fine. Now for some children a few months goes by. They just continue to wet their pull up no matter what.

That might be a case where now you need to encourage it a little bit. I know with my second son, I think he probably would still be wearing a nighttime pull up. He’s seven.

We really did have to do a bit of encouragement because he just didn’t mind. He didn’t really care about the feeling. He didn’t really seem that motivated. It didn’t bother him. We had to put some things in place to encourage that.

One of the things we did was set up a reward chart where every night he managed to make it through, he would get a reward in the morning. Then we even had to go a step further by just saying, “Listen. You’re not going to wear a pull up any more.”

If you feel like that’s the case, then what you need to do is get a few things ready before you start this. Make sure you have clean sheets right by the bed.

I would suggest you put down a plastic mattress over to protect the mattress, because there’s probably going to be a few accidents.

Then just know that if you have to wake up in the night to change a pair of pajamas or the bed sheets a couple of times, this is all part of the process as well.

If it means a few nights in a row you have to get up and help your child change the bed and change his jammies, really get him involved in this though, too. So it’s a bit of an inconvenience for him as well.

I would give it at least two weeks. After two weeks, then you would monitor. Is he getting the hang of it? Is he having some successful nights?

If every night for two weeks straight he has not been able to do this, then you may need to put it on the back burner and give it another month or two. Then try again.

It might be just that his body’s just not ready yet to make this through the night. Another thing you want to have a quick look at though is nighttime hours of sleep.

A lot of children if they’re overtired, they’ll sleep so deeply that they’re not going to get the messages that their brain’s trying to send. My advice would be to make sure your child’s getting a good 11 to 12 hours of nighttime sleep.

Then start this so that no over tiredness could be preventing success here. OK? First of all, relax. Do a few things to see if you can encourage it. Check it out with your doctor if you have any lingering concerns.

Eventually, they’ll make it through. Thanks for watching. Sleep well.