Autistic 9 year old daughter wetting the bed

[WorriedaboutASDkid]

As the title says - my 9 year old daughter still wets the bed every night, fairly often so much that it soaks the pull up and means we need to change the bed. She doesn’t have accidents in the day and isn’t constipated.

We tried getting her out of pull ups for a while when she was about 4 (at her request as her little brother had stopped wearing nappies at night) but never got more than a few days and then she wanted to stop.

She’s also autistic, with a demand avoidant profile, meaning that she finds demands/pressure very stressful. She says that she doesn’t think she’s ready to come out of them and is fine to keep wearing them. We haven’t ever seen a specialist because she’s got a certain amount of health anxiety and I didn’t want to make a big deal about it.

I don’t want to put unnecessary pressure on her but it is becoming a bit of a pain (changing sheets 3+times a week etc despite pull ups)… And also am aware that the official advice is that she should be seen by this age to check for underlying health issues. So my question is - should I get her seen, and run the risk of making her more self conscious and making the problem worse, in case there is a medical issue of some kind? Or is that really unlikely (this is my feeling) and therefore should I just wait until she says she wants to sort it out? Or will that never happen bc of her autism/resistance to change!? This has become a bit of a stream of consciousness but any advice would be appreciated

Absolutely get her seen. My autistic 9 yo dd had similar problems and we took her to the doctor a few years ago, and they were able to give her a medication which helped with her muscle control she is also hyper mobile which we didn’t realise until later and is common in people with asd and links with bladder problems. I absolutely can’t get my head round why you wouldn’t get her medical attention if she could benefit, surely her confidence would greatly improve by being dry at nights?

Thanks for your reply. I’m glad it was helpful for your daughter but all ASD kids are different. In my case it’s not really as simple as “she would benefit from medical attention” which is why I’ve posted for advice.

The reason why I haven’t got a referral before now is because as I mentioned she has some health anxiety and gets very stressed around medical appointments. Also at the moment she isn’t concerned about it so it’s not impacting on her confidence. I don’t want to make her more self conscious (and less confident!) by making her feel like it’s a big issue. In general with her it’s always better to take things slow and not make a big deal out of things. She’s also definitely not hyper mobile. So I’m mindful that getting doctors involved could make her feel worse, rather than better; also because if she isn’t motivated to try alarms etc it isn’t the right time anyway.

But I’ll speak to the school nurse again about getting her a referral - it’ll probably take a while in any case so can bring it up with her when the time comes.

Hi OP, I think I’d agree with getting a referral just incase there is some medical issue that needs attention. At age 9 it’s better to be safe than sorry on that front so I would definitely advise getting the ball rolling with that, and have multiple chats with her in the run up so that it doesn’t seem like a scary appointment that turns up all of a sudden.

One other thing to consider though is that if she is an anxious child/bit of a worrier in general then that could actually be causing or contributing to the bed wetting.

OP the ERIC website is recommended for advice so have a look there if you haven’t already. Does she drink plenty? Drinking more early in the day to stretch the bladder is recommended so it can hold more at night.

We have some mattress protectors from Amazon which work well to protect the bed. They go over the sheet and are about a third to a half of the bed length. Nothing goes through them and at least there’s only that to wash rather than sheets.

I would get her seen by paeds to make sure there isn’t any physical cause behind it and to be able to consider medication.

Given she has health anxiety, would you consider seeing a play therapist or similar to try to work through that and make the appointment with paeds easier and also help to preempt any time in the figure when medical testament is unavoidable?