8 year old still in pull ups at night

[WineIsMyMainVice]

DD8 is still in pull ups at night! We’re getting to the point where all usual supermarket pull ups are starting to leak as she gets older. We’ve tried everything! But they are still sodden in the morning (if we haven’t all been up in the night as they’ve leaked so we’ve had to put a new one on.)
I’m trying to get her to drink loads during the day so that she can stop an hour or so before bed. But it’s so hard when I pick her up from after school club and realise her drinks bottle is only half empty! We’ve talked about it a lot and she wants to be dry at night but she says she just forgets to drink at school.
It’s driving me crazy! Anyone else had any similar issues or got any advice please?

Recommend trying the alarms if you haven’t. I read mixed reviews but they worked for my DS who was keen to stop the pull-ups before a school trip. Felt we should try that before going to the doctor and it worked within a couple of weeks and then he gradually got consistently dry. The noise is not pleasant but it worked!

she might wet herself a couple of times but she’ll soon learn to get up and use the toilet at night. With the greatest respect, you need to stop micro managing her.

This shows an enormous lack of understanding of the situation. Do you not think that the OP didn't try this when toilet training her as a toddler?! Such an unhelpful comment.

Two out of three of my ds were still wet at night at 8.

It is considered normal until about this age

Please ignore comments about drinking - it is important that they have at least 7 big drinks a day to help stretch the bladder

Cut out all black currant drinks and any caffeine drinks

With ds1 we had to stop drinks 2 hours before bed

Pull ups do not make children wet at night. Both me and my mum still wet at that age and pull ups certainly were not around - not even disposable nappies!

With ds1 we had referral to specialist continence nurse - this is less common now - talk to your GP or school nurse

With ds3 we bought a bed wetting alarm through Amazon

The alarm worked for both boys - with perseverance and lots of sleepless nights at the beginning

Tablets were hit and miss for ds1 so we never bothered for ds3

www.eric.org.uk is the best website for facts and information

Another vote for a bedwetting alarm and getting the teacher to remind her to drink more during the day. We also got desmopressin for when she went away with school aged 8 - I was terrified she would wet the bed in the dorm and be bullied for it. Probably not a long term solution but they worked really well and could break the cycle? Definitely speak to the doctors anyway as there's loads they can do.

My dd is 9 and only became reliably dry in the last few months. I’ve never made a big fuss about it because it was completely out of her control. Night bed wetting is hormone related and she is now growing out of it.

My little brother had a bed alarm when he was a child with the same issue... If the most came into contact with moisture it set off the loudest alarm ever! It woke the whole house but not him - I guess he was such a deep sleeper. So we woke him up. It took a while but eventually he grew out of it (and he's almost 30 now).

@WineIsMyMainVice have a look at Therapee if you haven’t already. I was despairing of my daughter ever growing out of it, we had very full pull-ups every morning, but I absolutely didn’t want to go down the medication route and she was starting to become very self-conscious about it. I tried Therapee following a recommendation on a MN thread; I recognised the heavy sleeping they described. We’ve been doing it 3 weeks now and after a tough first 3 nights (alarm went off 3-4 times) we settled into a routine of one very small leak per night (she’d get up with the alarm and go to the loo) and now we’ve just had our second completely dry blue star night. I feel very hopeful that she’ll have cracked it by the end of the 3 month course.

Best wishes to you.

Have you tried some nights with her in no pull up? I ask as my dd’s nappies were sodden also and we were waiting for them to be dry, but she wanted to try when she was 6.5 and she was fine from night one. So waiting for the dry nappies could have taken forever in our case. Makes me wonder if we should have tried earlier. For two weeks I helped her have a wee around 10pm, which she had no memory of, then we tried a night without and she was fine without it from then on. Only wet the bed once in the year and half since then.

The alarms are fine IF your DC doesn't sleep too deeply - our DS slept right through it - while it woke me across the landing and through a closed door!

It's really common OP, so don't a) feel like a bad parent or b) that it's your DD's fault - it absolutely isn't. As for not being fobbed off by doctors once they're 8 - depends on the GP. We've been fobbed off again and again and just directed to the eric website, which doesn't actually fix the problem.

My DS is now 9 and was starting to get rashes on his skin from pull ups, so for the past couple of months I've been waking him at 11.30 before I go to bed and taking him for a wee. This works most of the time to prevent bed wetting, although it's not failsafe and depends on what he's drunk. I echo avoiding caffeine and would add fizzy drinks and squash, both of which seem to make DS wee at night. Plain water is the only drink he had now in the evening and that and the waking is the best solution we've come up with.