Night Time Training

I'd try no liquids after 6pm...except maybe a quick last drink of water after brushing teeth. I also would not wake her up in the middle of the night at 4.5years old. I would be prepared to buy more pull up's and use them until she is waking up @ 4 mornings per week dry for a couple of months in a row THEN try to get those remaining days dry while making the transition to underwear at night. I was probably 7-8 years old before I completely stopped wetting the bed...deep sleep was a huge issue but disrupting a child's sleep EVERY night is not the way to go. Bed wetting is very common and needs to be handled delicately. At 4.5years old it sounds like her body just needs more time...good luck!

This has come up alot lately, so you may want to go back in and look through for more responses. Briefly, she has no control over what her body does when she's asleep, period. If she's not making it through the night, her body's not developed enough. It may take til she's 6-7. Waking her in the night causes problems with her sleep patterns, and what's the point if her body's not ready? All you're doing is ruining her sleep. Get the pullups, pad the bed, and everyone get a good night's sleep. When she's consistently dry for awhile, try the panties again. She may be ready soon, or she may not. It's out of her control.

With our son, we did no liquids after 6pm, he went potty right before he went to bed, around 7:30, and then right before we went to bed around 10 or 10:30 we would get him up to go potty. I gave it about 2 weeks, and did a lot of laundry initially, but into the 2nd week he was dry more than he was wet, and by 3 weeks dry almost every morning. We eventually stopped getting him up to potty (maybe after about a month? and he started getting up himself). Now (about 6 months later), we still have the occasional accident if he's up too late or drinks too much too late.

I don't think you should need to get up in the middle of the night. Try to make it easier on you too. I think in our case it was a bad habit, and it went on so long because we let him have the pull ups too long, but every child is different. Your child may or may not be ready, but it might be worth trying. If our son had kept waking up wet, we would have gone back to the pull ups, but luckily we didn't have to. Good luck!

You are on the right track.
Take her to the potty right before bed. Then carry her to the potty 2 hours or so later. Mine hardly even wakes up. Use a monitor and train her to call out if she wakes up and has to pee in the middle of the night. She may have an occasional accident, but she will learn to wake up and let you know.

There's no neurological reason that this is impossible. But if she is wearing a diaper at night, she probably won't learn to wake herself up when she feels the need to pee, at least not until she's 7.

Hi! Hope you had a great weekend too!

Daytime potty training is completely different than nighttime training.
When an adult's bladder is full at night, a signal goes from the bladder to the brain and we are awakened with the need to go. For children, this signaling mechanism comes with age. They cannot be "trained" until their body develops this mechanism.

You may simply need to give her some more time. Watch to see if (1) her pull-up is dry most mornings and, (2) you hear her get up to pee during the night. Even if she goes a few weeks without wetting the pull-up, it is still possible that she'll have an occasional night accident at this age. (Especially if she is a deep, solid sleeper -- like mine!) But it will work out with a little more time.

I've read that most Pediatricians do not advocate waking your child to go potty at this age -- so we avoid this at our house. Good luck!

I agree with Nancy. LG she has not already been dry because of maturity, then keep using the pullups. When she is asleep there is no training beyond what her body is ready to do.

M.

I bought my daughter poise pads to put in her panties and triple layered her bed with sheets and mattress protectors so when she did have accidents all I had to do was remove down to the dry layer. Once she could wake up dry, we stopped using the poise pads.

As for actual training, no liquids 1 hour before bed. For the first month, I made her potty after story time, woke her up around midnight, and again at 3 am. Second month, I dropped the midnight time. After that, I dropped all wake ups and she is able to sleep through the night without incident. My daughter night trained when we potty trained at 2.5, so it may be different for your daughter.

Hope this helps!

do you have plenty of nightlights out? we have one in the hallway and one in the bathroom and our daughter just recently started going potty by herself at night, because "it's not scary with the lights".

That being said, I had to train myself to dream that I had to pee and eventually it would wake me up. I was a bedwetter until I was 12ish, we had rubber sheets under the regular ones so I didnt ruin the mattress.

I did this last summer with my daughter when she was 5. I tried training her 3yo sister at the same time. For 2 weeks we cut off liquids early, pottied before bed and woke them up to go potty in the night. After about a week or so my 3 yo had this down and was regularly waking up to potty on her own (though she did cry for a while the first few nights upon waking herself). My 5yo was and still is a heavy sleeper who does not like to be disturbed. While we could gently guide the 3yo to the potty and help her on, we often had to battle with the 5yo to even get to the bathroom. Even if we could get her sitting on the toilet she would freak out and not go. So every night we had wet sheets, sometimes multiple times a night. Not that she woke up and complained. We would discover the wet sheets when we would come in to wake her to take her to the bathroom. She wouldn't notice for herself until it was morning and she was fully awake. The pedi suggested a bedwetting alarm but we decided it wouldn't be worth the cost knowing how she was with just us waking her. She is sensitive to loud noises too. So we resolved to just give her more time to mature and outgrow this. She still wears pull-ups/goodnites at bed. I think she has maybe had two dry nights in the last year. She was so proud of herself to wake up dry. But she is still very resistant to the idea of being woken to go potty at night. We don't bother trying unless we hear her stirring already. She will sometimes go then but we still have lots of nights of refusing to go potty.

I write this to let you know that not all kids will respond to night training like people think they should. My daughter is 6 now and would love to be dry at night but we are just not there yet. It is still considered in the realm of normal until age 7.

At this point she is so young to understand. If you really want it to work though I would not give her anything to drink past dinner time. Maybe a little milk (as milk is actually a solid). You can buy these plastic/cloth covers, they are about 4'x4'. They use them in hospitals. Put her to bed as normal, make sure she goes to the bathroom prior to. If you go through this and she continues' to wet, then its just not her time. Get the pull ups back out. If she doesn't wet either way, praise her and tell her what a good little girl she is.
I was lucky with my daughter, once she potty trained at 14mos. she didn't wet to bed after about 18mos. I was very surprised. You can also allow her to wear her new underwear but put plastic pants on her as well.
Good luck and I wish you the best.

Hi E.,
I'm M. Francis with the GoodNites Nite Lite Panel. Goodnites is partnering with Mamapedia and your question is one I encounter a lot, so I wanted to jump in with my thoughts.

Some kids are very sound sleepers, and snoozing right through potty time--especially in the middle of the night--is very common for children Ariana's age. Waking her up a few hours after she falls asleep is a good idea, or very early in the morning. When my youngest son, who's almost 5, wets the bed it almost always happens in the morning, when he's trying to rouse himself to make it to the bathroom but can't quite wake up in time. Having a regular bedtime and making sure she's getting enough sleep are also good ways to help her make it through the night dry. If she wets the bed often despite doing all those things, it may just be that she's developmentally not quite ready to be dry all night yet--which is very normal in kids of her age. GoodNites.com has lots of information about bedwetting in kids of all different ages. Good luck and let us know how it goes!