Peeing the Bed - Mather,CA

Urinary accidents and foul smell to the urine can be the first signs of a urinary tract infection. Uti's can go on undiagnosed for months before they work their way up into the kidney..if they do it is at this point a fever will start, they sleep excessively,won't eat, and basically become pretty ill. So don't rule out a UTI if there is no fever.

If a uti is ruled out, another thing that can cause bedtime incontinence is an imbalance in the calcium to magnesium ratio. Milk has 8 times the CA compared to MG. Children with high dairy and milk diets can have increased incontinance issues. Also some breads have calcium propionate which affects bedwetting. Calcium is now added to many foods. Watch the labels. Calcium is a necessary and good thing, but too much calcium causes hypocalcification and depletes Magnesium. Supplementing magnesium and decreasing breads and dairy, increasing hormone free meat and organic veggies, helped for our son. Everytime he drinks milk at night - he pees the bed.

The pituitary gland is part of the endocrine system, and it is responsible for secreting ADH (antidiuretic hormone), which regulates water reabsorption. Low ADH is connected to bedwetting. Diabetes can be a cause for bedwetting. Deficiency of ADH causes diabetes and excessive loss of water, which is an edocrine disorder.

There are endocrine disrupting chemicals in our environment. They bind to steroid receptors and mimic normal hormones. Mercury is included, and so is SOY. 70% of processed/produced foods have some form of soy. Percholate in milk, bromine in breads and baked goods, chlorine in tap water are endocrine disruptors. I am not saying they are to blame because I don't know, but they are something to consider.

All communications in the body are regulated either by the endocrine system or the nervous system. Many hormone chemicals are extensions of the nervous system.

The B complex vitamins are nervous system supporters and again so is MG. I give my kids liquid b complex drops under the tounge.

There are herbal and prescription sublingual sprays available. I have never used them and personally I would try to improve the diet and get out as much chemical additives, food colorings, etc, before I went the other route.
Some presecription incontinence meds have Imaprine in them, which is a tricyclic antidepressant.

Please use this as a springboard for your own research and consult your doctor.

Hi M.,

I read your story and I understand how much you are going through with this. You need to take son to see the doctor the sooner the better. The bed wetting problem is deeper than we thought. It not only related to his psychological behavior the well being of his kidney. I did not know by then when my first born had that problem and I was always get mad at her thinking that she was so lazy to get out of her bed to go to bathroom at nights. It started when she was 4. I did not know the seriousness of the problem until she was 17 and my second was 5 and he started the same problem. I thought I had enough of smelling beds in my house so I took both of them to a specialist. He prescribed a spray for them before bed. It cured them within a month. Sorry it was too long ago for me to remember the medication's name. I hope you will find help soon for your son. Something that is beyond our control so we need professional help to get it done. Good luck.

Just curious. What is your emotional relationship with the grandparents? You said "his grandparents" as if they were not your parents, so are they your husbands? You son picked up on something. Enough to upset his progress and daily routine. Kids can feel the undercurrent even if we try to fake it. So the two extremes are he was coddled so much that he was enticed to be a baby again, or the other end, he was scared and regressed. Look closer, you know what it was and it has to do with how you are treated in relationship to your son. Act accordingly: if he was coddled tell him he is still a big boy. If he was scared tell him he is safe.
Good Luck.

You should not be at all concerned. Instead focus on how exciting it is that he's already trained during the day at such a young age!! Your enthusiasm and positivity will bolster his confidence greatly and could even improve his overall behavior/cooperation in general. Anxiety you have about this topic will be unconsciously be reflected in your behavior (seeping out of your pores, so to speak) - that will not do anything to help him.

My son is also 2.5 and potty trained during the day. Several weeks back, after too many nights having to change sheets and seeing the distress this caused him, I realized something had to change. I discussed the topic with many moms of older boys and discovered that it is extremely common for boys to wet while sleeping for as many as 10 years after being potty trained; although, of course, it occurs less frequently the older they get. Some of these moms had tried everything in the book to "fix" the "problem" of bed-wetting. After much heartache, they finally determined that boys just sleep very deeply and have a different level of physical control than girls.

As a result of those conversations, my decision was to tell my son he would wear pull-ups only for night time, so he wouldn't have to worry about waking up wet and cold. We bought the pull-ups with the "learning designs" that disappear when he wets...we check in the morning to see if the design is still there and celebrate a little together with hugs/high-fives if he hasn't wet the pull-up. This has not discouraged him or caused him to regress in training at all, so I don't see any problem with it. At this point, he stays dry 90% of the time, so at some point I will give him the option of underwear at night on a trial basis.

Wish you the best! :)

No you should not be concerned, he is very, very young to be fully potty trained. I would keep him in the pull ups and just encourage him to go potty before bed and to wake you if he needs to go during the night. Cut liquids off a couple of hours before bedtime (except) for a small drink just before (a few sips).

Some perfectly healthy children, far older then your child, are bed wetters because they are very sound sleepers.

Blessings.....

My daughter just turned 3 but she has been fully out of diapers day and night since she was 2. Before bed she uses her little potty and then after story time she might go again and then either my husband or I take her to the toilet to pee her around 10 or 11 right before we go to bed. We keep the lights off and whisper quietly and tell her to pee. She falls right back to sleep. If we don't get there in time she gets up by herself and either calls for us to take her or she uses her little potty by herself. We have found her a number of times asleep on it and have had a good laugh. We also have a water proof pad under the sheet .

Please realize that night time wetting is NOT actually related to potty training! What you're thinking of as regression may simply be that his little bladder is not growing as fast as the rest of him. Also, night time wetting can also be caused by his body's failure to make enough of the chemical that signals the body to stop creating urine while asleep. In other words, this may not be related to anything in his waking world - it's simply a physical issue that he'll grow out of.

My husband was a bed wetter until he was 8 - not every night, but maybe once a week or so. He recalls being so humiliated by it - he'd try so hard to "remember" to wake up, but of course it never worked. Our older daughter wet the bed until she was almost 5. We bought night time pull-ups for her and didn't say anything about it. She would put them on under her pajamas every night and throw them away in the morning. She was always mortified that she wet the bed - she's always been a fastidious child and we easily potty trained her before she turned 2. So, it's not about the child wanting to use the potty, it really can be a physical thing that they have no control over. (Ironically, our younger daughter, who was a total struggle to potty train by 2.5, never wet the bed - our older daughter thought it was so unfair that she was still in night time pull-ups when baby sister didn't need them!)

I'd have the doctor check him over to be sure he doesn't have a kidney infection or something of that sort, but if not, then just buy pull-ups for him to wear at night. It will not undermine his ability to use the potty normally during the day.

My advice would be to have him go potty about an hour before bed, then no more fluid, then go potty again right at bed time.

Separate from that do you have a sense of WHEN in the night he's wetting? I guess it's harder to know since he wears a pull up. But anyway, I ask because when my son went through a patch like that I couldn't figure out why the pee wasn't waking him up. Anyway, it turned out, he WAS staying dry all night, it was only in the morning when he was half awake that he was peeing! (When i would check on him before my shower, he'd be dry and asleep, but when I got out of the shower he'd be standing there in soaked jammies needing his sheets changed!). I started just getting him up when I woke up, having him go potty and then tucking him in on the couch and letting him watch Disney channel while I showered. Problem solved. I don't wake him up anymore (cause it really is easier to get ready while he's still sleeping) but now he's learned that as soon as he wakes up he needs to go straight to the potty and it seems to work okay. He has an accident about once every month or so (he's almost 4 now potty trained since 2).

Hope this is helpful.

T.

Don't worry about taking a few steps backwards...Thats basically how parenting is. Just be sure to support your son and let him know that it's OK...He will one day soon out grow this. The more support you give him, the faster the phase will end. Your trip was fun I'm sure, but took him out of his routine (even if you're like my family - with little routine). It will take a while to get back into things. Patience and love!

Even though my son was potty trained, he still had accidents in the bed a few nights a week. I just chalked it up to an accidents. There were no new events in his life, no upsets at school and basically his life was and is pretty consistent. therefore, I just chalked it up to accidents do happen. Of course, to deal with it, we bought one of those pads that have plastic on one side and cotton on the opposite and put that underneath him. He is now 8 and hasn't had an accident in a long time.
I think it will pass, but worried, maybe talk to your pediatrician.

Hello M.,
You will always have tiumes of 3 steps forward and 6 back when 1st teaching something but once they get it it's with them forever.
I think at 21/2 your son is just getting into a deep sleep and relaxing his body. We all do it only we have learned to control it. As the mother of 5 with 3 of them being boys-- I kept them in pull ups until they were nearly 3. By then it was only when they were sick that we had a problem. With so much going on during the hoilday season and all the excitement of seeing peopl's houses decorated and the changes from one house and set of rules to another and such it may just be to much for him right now. I know that my 21/2 year old grandaughter is still wearing pull ups at night only since she is in a regular bed and not a protected crib mattress. Otherwise just buy a plain old shower curtain and put it on the bed to protect the mattress. I will tell you that he may not like being in wet underpants and you will have to find where he hid them so they do not stink up the room. Good Luck, Nana GLenda

With kids, regression on most things is normal.

My personal feeling: Just put the diapers and pull ups back on for a few months and save yourself a lot of laundry, stress, annoyance and general grief.

Potty-training is overrated. They all learn to do it one way or another soon enough.