bedwetting during sleep

[DEANNA]

My son is 9 and still wets bed nightly. I understand that there is exercises to stregnthen his sphincter muscle and also sleep patters because he stays in stage 4 sleeping all the time. help

[cm]

My son is 12 and still wets. My husband was just diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. He would get up to go to the bathroom all through the night until he got his CPAP machine for sleep apnea. Now no more getting up.

That got me to thinking about my son who has snored for years and just doesn't dream. He may be hard to wake up, but I'm not so sure it's REM sleep, and maybe that's making him wet at night. I'm ready to look into a possible sleeping disorder for him, especially with his dad's problem and my weird sleeping problems myself. I think I have some narcolepsy symptoms.

[CC]

I was a bed wetter until the age of 12 and my older sister until she was 13 (I am now 30). It was a miserable experience for the two of us and a lot of humiliation involved. Back in the 70's there wasn't a lot to do about this problem with the exception of the exercise and honestly - it rarely works. The doctor finally told my mother that it was something we had to grow out of - which we did. My nephew (age 8) is also a bed wetter and my sister buys the teen diapers/nightpants for him to wear - it's not a solution but it does fix the problem of changing the sheets in the middle of the night. She has found that after she stopped dwelling on the problem as much, he is slowly having dry nights (instead of everynight now just 5-6 nights a week). We compared thoughts and realized thats when we stopped wetting the bed is when our mother gave up and stopped making a major production about it - it was still there but nothing to dwell on. Reflecting back, as a bed wetter I would try so hard not to wet the bed I rarely slept sound - instead I would toss and turn waiting... In that regard - It was a miserable childhood. As parents we must remember that this is not really harming our child but your actions towards this nightly problem can scar your child for life (just a thought).

[joz]

Try not mentioning the problem for a month or so. My son had the same problem and I would ask him, nicely of course, if there had been any accidents through the night. I realised this must have been embarrassing so we had a final chat about it not being a problem, it's only water after all and I didn't mention it again. After a couple of weeks he was dry bar a couple of accidents.Good luck.

[nowhere man]

Like CC, I was also one until I was about 13 (I am 43 now). Do not know why I did it or why I stopped. It just happened.
I know I used, and still do, to go into deep sleep rather fast. Not necessarily REM, but so deep that you could drive a truck through my bedroom and not wake me up. My accidents normally happened within the first hour I was sleeping, in spite of going to the bathroom minutes before falling sleep.
I was embarrased. My friends knew because my parents used to put my matress outside to dry and vent out.
There was nothing I could do.

Good luck!