Avoid lots of fluids before bed
It is important to keep your child hydrated. Drinking enough water helps the body function properly and helps keep the kidneys healthy. However, encouraging your child to drink most of his or her water intake earlier in the day so that less water is drunk in the hour or two before bedtime can help ensure that the body does not produce lots of urine at night.
Watch what fluids your child drinks
Some fluids cause more problems that others. While your child is trying to overcome bedwetting, it is often best to stick with water. Colas, dark teas, and coffee all contain caffeine that irritates the bladder and also may increase the urgency to urinate more frequently. If your child is older, alcohol may also affect bedwetting by ensuring that motor controls (needed to wake up) are affected while the need to urinate is increased.
Apple juice also seems to cause increased urine in some children, thanks to the two substances, patulin and gallic acid, that it contains. Encourage your child to eat apples during the day, but do not serve apple juice or applesauce in the evenings.
Watch what your child consumes
Some parents have also found that sugary foods, carbonated drinks, milk, yellow cheese and other products containing these foods. Try cutting specific foods from your child’s diet for a while to see whether these foods have any effect on bedwetting. Monitor what your child eats before bedtime closely and eliminate any foods that seem to contribute to bedwetting, or at least limit these foods to morning.
Remember: When limiting specific foods, take great care to ensure that you child eats a balanced diet that still includes plenty of foods from each food group. Bedwetting is a minor problem compared to vitamin deficiency.
Night trips to the bathroom
Encourage your child to go to the bathroom before sleep. You can even wake him or her up when you go to sleep so that he or she can urinate again. This gets rid of the urine in the bladder, reducing the chances that the bladder will be left with enough urine to vacate in the night again. Even if your child wets the bed, the amount of wetness will be reduced. Some parents also find that this technique alone is enough to help bedwetting. Even if it is not, it is a safe method that can be used with other remedies.
For many children who wet the bed, the problem comes from the fact that the bladder simply does not communicate well with the body. For most of us, when we have to urinate during sleep, our body wakes us up and we can head to the bathroom before returning to bed. For children with Enuresis, this system does not work. In addition, many children who wet the bed are also very heavy sleepers. Basically, the bladder empties itself since the body does not wake up to allow the child to go to the bathroom. In some cases, the child might not even notice the problem until they wake up the next morning.
There are a number of alarms on the market that your child can wear. These emit a noise when moisture is detected. They will wake your child up, allowing him or her to go to the bathroom. Even if your child is a very heavy sleeper and will not wake up, the alarm can wake up the rest of the household, so that you can wake your child up. The idea behind this device is that the child will eventually learn to wake him or herself after being woken up by the alarm several times. Some improvement will usually be seen in about two weeks.
