To punish DD every time she wets herself.

[sleepdeprivedby2]

DD is five years old and still wets herself multiple times a day, in the last 6 months she has been dry for 2 days!

I am at my wits end as we have tried absolutely everything to help her, star/reward charts, lots of praise for going to the toilet etc etc, you name it over the last 2 years we have tried it. The only thing we haven't tried is a consequence for being wet!

We are currently waiting for a paediatric referral but this has been cancelled once, so I am not holding out much hope.

The main crux of the problem is that she just doesn't care about being wet, going to the toilet is an inconvenience which she puts off and off. She will wet her pants and still not go to the toilet!

Normally I just ignore it as much as possible and then send her to get herself changed but I am completely fed up of her whole attitude towards it and her determination not to help herself.

We have bought her a watch which vibrates during the school day (every 1.5 hours) to remind her to go, but she just ignores it, puts it in her bag or leaves it at home! Every day when I pick her up she has had at least one change of clothes and is usually wet again and she smells really bad!

Tonight at bath time, she got in the bath (with her 2 year old brother) and stood and wee'd in the bath rather than go to the toilet less than a meter away. I took her out the bath, put her on the toilet and told her to sit there whilst I refilled the bath at which point she started screaming at me so I calmly picked her up and put her in bedroom and shut the door.
Two minutes later she comes in the bathroom "mummy it was a bad idea to put me my room because now there is poo on the floor".
At which point I explained that her behaviour was completely unacceptable, told her to go to the toilet, walked out the bathroom, cleaned the carpet and went to play with her brother.

I know everyone says to ignore the bad behaviour and praise the good but as you can see it's just not working!! There are no real consequences to her wetting herself, we send her to get changed and she plays in her room still in her wet clothes or puts one of her princess dresses on.

So do we give her a consequence every time she wets to make her realise that this is not acceptable or do we continue to ignore through gritted teeth and hope she is dry before her tenth birthday.

Thanks for reading

sleepdeprivedby2, you've obviously tried absolutely everything you can think of. I really, really hope that the paed referral comes up trumps for you. Parenting can be horribly tough sometimes. She will get there, even if it takes a while - there has to be a reason and they will get to it. In the meantime, I am going to do that whole un-Mumsnetty hug thing.

Wow, it does sound like you've got pretty much the patience of a saint.

I think you need the support of that referral to get to the bottom of this.

I wouldn't make any drastic changes to your approach until you've had some expert input on this.

From my experience working with young children it sounds very unusual for an otherwise bright and settled 5 year old to have such an on-going difficulty with staying dry. Most children will get the idea and take a hint especially with a bit of praise much more readily.

I hope you can get some more help, advice, and support soon.
Good luck cracking this one. I don't think you're doing anything wrong.

janelikesjam, are you as pleasant and understanding to everyone in your life, or just to strangers on the internet? Because if it is the former, it is not the OP's child that I feel sorry for...

Toothbrush, I do have rationality. I am all about the rationality of the child trying to be in the world, without adults giving "permission" for toilet trips in "timeouts" and "punishment". Thats all.

Thanks everyone for your responses.

Normally I just brush it off and don't let it bother me, but tonight I had just had enough of having to deal with it all of the time and everything else that surrounds it.

I do feel better for writing this down and talking about it though, going t bed now, will check back in the morning.

Just out of interest (and I completely understand if it's unaffordable, or you don't want to for ethical reasons) have you asked if your GP can make the referral privately? My son couldn't feed properly even from a bottle, and we got a private referral to a consultant in Southampton who cut his tongue-tie. As it happened the NHS locally paid it so they sent our cheque back, but it was only £100 anyway. Cheap at the price when most of my expressed milk was dribbling down his chin. Again I am so sorry if money makes that impossible, but you may get seen a little faster, perhaps? Or in a neighbouring Trust where lists may be shorter - we were cited a 9 month wait locally unless he proved incapable of eating solids, too.

OP - check out the behavioural threads, there are some posts on there and solutions that have had reasonable success.

Having done some research on this for a friend, it does sound like she is controlling in some way. What is your homelife like? do you work? How was she starting school, did she go somewhere she didn't know? and whilst on the face of it is happy and confident and top of her class - perhaps she feels under pressure and this is her way of letting you know. Because she cannot actually tell you.

Do you think she is trying to get attention some way?

I wish you luck I think perhaps this is one of the most demoralising areas of parenthood

libelulle, seconded. Loudly. (In capitals, even!)

libelull, i am just defending the child here. not to say parents don't find it difficult, who hasn't, but the OP came in from a punishing angle. and then confirmed it with her timeout stuff.

I think you know quite well jane that the op was explaining that her daughter was well aware that she could use the toilet during time-out in case anyone thought that was why she had pooed in her room, rather than that she had given her permission

It sounds like the OP would LOVE DD to use the loo rather than giving permission. A world without punishment eh? Perhaps you could apply your generosity of spirit to this stressed mum who I'd say loves her child immensely and is being tested sorely

No Jane, you are not defending the child. You are trying to compensate for your own very apparent sense of inadequacy by positioning yourself as the heroine, when all these terrible people are failing a child!!!11!!

I'm sorry you are that insecure, but it's seriously annoying when what you're doing is trying to exorcise that at the expense of a knackered, worried, LOVING mother.

Please grow up. And do it somewhere else.

I know a parent who doesn't believe in punishing her child. Her child is horribly behaved. I don't let dd play with her out of school because she thinks it's acceptable to hit my 1 year old son repeatedly while her mother, very nicely, repeatedly tells her that hitting isn't nice and we mustn't hit

Last year my daughter (then in Y3!!) began to wet herself quite regularly at school and when out but never at home. Both I and her teacher were convinced it was deliberate as she was often visibly desperate to go before having very big 'accidents'.

It turned out that she was developing OCD and was afraid that toilets outside of our home were dirty. So, although in a sense the wetting was deliberate, it also wasn't really her fault.

Now she is 9 and usually in contol of it but she will still wet herself rather than use a strange toilet if she is very anxious or upset. Its incredibly frustrating and embarrassing and I admit to having shouted on occasion but it only makes the problem worse.

At the moment your daughter's problem is unknown but I think it's very likely that there is one. I don't think punishing her will help.

Mostly what i hear on this thread is punishment and lack of understanding (towards chldren). Very, very, very depressing thread.

Dd drove us to distraction endlessly wetting herself, and like your daughter she didn't seem to care. She also held on for as long as possible. We saw a gp referred Potty Training Nurse who was extremely nice. She talked to us and dd, and it became clear to me very quickly (for some reason it had not been clear before) that dd was getting a lot of attention from being wet all the time and not going to the loo when I asked her. Strangely the minute the Potty Training Nurse left the problem cleared up, as if the tension lifted and dd decided at 5 to stop gettng attention through that particular means!
I suspect in your dd's case, this has gone on so long that her bladder has lost a lot of the cues you normally get and the usual wet and dry cues are now mixed up, unless she is particularily vigilant as on the fancy dress day. I have an ASD child the same age who was always dry and now intermittently still holds on too long, yet on special occasions he never wets himself, because he concentrates. That explains why she can be dry sometimes but not always. It may be also that your dd has stopped associating the physical sensations of needing to pee with going to the toilet - a special place, which after all we all programme ourselves to hold on for, and it has all become mixed up in her head, and become just another physical sensation that is normal at any time. I think you need to see a professional for a strategy. It is not as simple as punishing her. It is too big a part of her day to day existence now, and you have to go back to the beginning again and re-programme her so to speak, also to sort out any tension that is making her want to regress so much. Presumably you have thought of the fact that she wants to be like her little brother and is behaving like a much younger child subconsciously?
My dd was trying to get attention away from her much loved twin brother, and it was one method of making sure I asked her dozens of times if she needed the loo, accompanying her to change clothes, showing negative attention (ie; getting frustrated and cross) which was as good as any attention in dd's book.

So there are two parts to the problem, a habit that feels normal to her, and the underlying behavioural reason for regressing in the first place.

She will be fine! I promise, you will get there. My ASD child still wets himself every month, but dd has never since she was five, bar the very very occasional justifiable accident which she is absolutely mortified about.

I think you'll find that most people on here (me included) have said that they wouldn't punish for toilet accidents so not sure what thread you're reading.
It IS depressing that no-one else understands kids like you jane but I can't see what can be done about it. You can't adopt all the kids in the world can you?

You can only hope that one day other mothers might develop a similar gift to the one that you have.

SMR

jane you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about. Seriously. Kids will still have timeouts if that's the way the parents choose to discipline them. The OP is asking if she is BU for punishing her DD for wetting herself. This does not mean that the OP's child is an angel that does not do anything else wrong! If anything, the OP was trying to say that her DD knows she can go to the toilet no matter what - including a time out. So start reading properly and stop talking such crap.

I had constipation issues until I was at least 10. It started around the time my sister was born (I was 4) and it was something I just grew out of eventually. There were all sorts of complicated reasons behind it, which I still don't truly understand myself. I went through the entire NHS mental health system and I was on antidepressants aged 7/8. It was a horrible time.

I think it came down to an attention thing - I really couldn't stand going from an only child to having a baby sister (and then a cousin, in the space of a week) and it was a way to get attention. The psychologists worked out that when I was happy and confident in myself I had less accidents, and if I had one-on-one time with parents then it made me more secure. That was one of many reasons, but in the end I just decided that I couldn't deal with going to "big school" and being smelly. So I stopped.

Big hugs OP, I know that this can't be easy for you.

As I said, "I am all about the rationality of the child trying to be in the world, without adults giving "permission" for toilet trips in "timeouts" and "punishment". Thats all. AfternoonDelight, read your post about your own issues with your family, rather than attack me.

And there was me thinking it was about you trying to convince yourself of the merits of your wacky parenting methods by putting other people down. Silly me!
I bet you let your kids express themselves don't you jane and if that means trashing someone's house/whatever then that's fine. They should be allowed to explore the world in their own way

Is your DD much of a fan of TV? As she appears to be able to 'not go' to get her rewards, maybe they have to be a daily reward, rather than weekly? If, say, she always has TV after school, then if she has a dry day at school she gets her TV that afternoon. Wet at school, no TV that afternoon.

Your DD has shown that she can control it. A daily incentive may well work.

My ds once pooed on the floor in his room because I put him in time out. I was so shocked I was actually lost for words (for a while!)
It was a dirty protest. Not nice.
Anyhoo.
I think your dd is getting a lot of attention for this issue from you (understandably)but there may be more to it, so agree with outside help if possible.

jane The rest of my post was aimed at the OP to try and help her.

Just because you don't agree with timeouts doesn't mean that they aren't used by other parents effectively. As I said, the OP has said that she has not punished her child for wetting herself. It doesn't mean that she doesn't get punished for other things, as the OP sees fit.