4.5 yo DS wetting bed every night

[Naliny]

My 4.5 YO DS was potty trained at 2.5 years old, and was pretty much accident-free within 48 hours. Couldn’t believe my luck. Only at night we still put a nappy on, and were planning to remove that gradually over the following year as we did with his older brother (who was then completely nappy free just after his 3rd birthday).

2 years later, and we are still nowhere near ready to get rid of his nappy at night. Not only that, but he actually pees so much during the night that it goes through the nappy and soaks his clothes and the bedsheets. I am more than over having to change the sheets every day!

We make him wee before he goes to bed, and he doesn’t drink anything after supper normally.

I am just wondering if there could me a medical reason for the sheer amount of bed wetting? Any insights or experience?

There can be different reasons but there will be a service for night time wetting provided where you live so you should either go to the gp or access via the school nurse service.

For DS it was due to chronic constipation. A friend's DS has a condition and takes medication. Another was just a very heavy sleeper who needed to use an alarm to train him to wake up when he needed a wee in the night.

None of those could be resolved without some help from healthcare professionals x

Night dryness is hormonal, and doesn’t in any way correlate to daytime dryness. You can try your GP, but at 4.5 I’m fairly confident they’ll just tell you to wait it out. Try higher absorbency nappies, or failing that double up/use a waterproof sheet.

I agree with @GiltEdges, at that age I'm not sure the GP will do much beside tell you to come back in 6 months/a year.

My ds is 10 and has only just stopped wetting the bed.

Some kids stop earlier. Some stop later.

It is all within the realms of normal.

Make sure you protect the mattress with pads and never make a big deal about it.

Meh, it’s hormonal - the doctors are unlikely to be interested until at least 7. Use dry night pull ups. Waterproof sheet., quite a few kids wet the bed at that age.

Until they are about 8yrs old night time wetting is not considered a problem.

To be dry at night the body needs to release a particular hormone so it is not within anyone's control

However there are things that can help

Increasing day time drinking to about 7 large drinks a day
Cutting out caffeine drinks and black currant
Ensuring the child does a double wee at bedtime (eg one before brushing teeth and one afterwards)
No drinks an hour before bed

'Lifting' the child to go to the toilet during the night is not recommended.

With ds1 we went to the GP at about 8 years and worked with a specialist continence nurse. He was dry after 2 years even with medication. The alarm was successful eventually

Ds2 was dry day and night in a week!

Ds3 we decided to not do anything until he was 8yrs then went straight to using an alarm. It worked in a couple of months. If he drinks too much in the evening he still wets the bed at 12yrs

We’re under the paediatric continence service here, where you can get referred the day after their 5th birthday if they’re still wet at night (we’re a very long way past that… ). Until then… are you using night time pull-ups, and are you acquainted with the Eric website, lots of ideas and bedding stuff there.

Thank you so much for all your replies. Interesting to hear about the hormones - I didn’t know that! And reassuring to hear that 4.5 years still seems to be within the realm of the normal. Let’s see what happens in the next six months.

One of my children was dry day and night at two, the other was dry in the day at five but nights was a couple of years longer. We put her in the largest cloth nappies we could buy and they were more effective than disposable, especially when used with a plastic cover. We left a plastic lined sheet on her bed until she was 8 too. She eventually outgrew the night wetting.

eric.org.uk/advice-for-children-with-night-time-wetting/

This is useful. My ds wet at night until age 13. Nothing worked but he did eventually grow out of it.

My DS wet the bed regularly til age 8-10. Reasonably often til 10-11.
Now 12.5 and no accidents for about a year. Just grew out of it.

DD 3 years younger has wet the bed maybe 3 times since age 2/3.

My DS is almost 7. He finally became dry at night about 8 months ago. Like your DS he had never had a dry night and regularly leaked out of his nappies. On that I can recommend bed mats, they go on top of the sheet. Then when they are wet you can just take away the wet mat and change the pyjamas and don’t have to do a whole bed change in the middle of the night (except sometimes he’d do an epic one which managed to get the duvet and even occasionally pillows wet 🙄)

These are the mats we had:
www.amazon.co.uk/Washable-Bed-Protector-Pad-Tucks/dp/B008645BP6/ref=sr_1_24?keywords=bed+wetting+mats&qid=1672262601&sr=8-24

they washed and dried really quickly.

Anyway as I say DS never had a dry night. Obviously it is hormonal but also with my DS I think his body needed to be trained to wake as he was so accustomed to just sleeping through peeing, so we tried a bed wetting alarm. It wakes up when moisture hits it so at first it isn’t waking them up until they’ve already started wetting, but the idea is that it starts to retrain their brain to wake before they need to go. The first time we tried it, we used it for a week and had no success, so went back to nappies. Tried again a few months later and it seemed he was then ready - within a week we had dry nights (but not consistently), within about 3 weeks he was completely dry.

I agree with PPs that it could be hormonal. However I had a similar problem with my Dd until she was six; gp said it was hormonal.

However she was referred to the hospital for a sleep study (for what we thought were unrelated reasons). She was diagnosed with sleep apnea but it was only then the Drs realised how deep a sleeper she was. She was in such a deep sleep that she wasn't waking up even when she was lying in the cold wet patch and her clothes were soaked through

The dr told us not to worry about it and to keep using night time pants but to occasionally put her to bed without them. If she had an accident but never woke up as a result, she was in too deep a sleep to realise she needed to pee. He said it would get to a stage where it would begin to wake her when she had an accident. He said that was the point at which to so pull-up free overnight as her body was in a state where her body would be awake enough to control her bladder and/or wake her before she had an accident

Should have added my Dd grew out of this naturally around 7/7.5 but she is still the worlds deepest sleeper. She only sleeps about 8-9 hours a need but must be all she needs but during that time it's almost impossible to wake her no matter what we try. Sometimes it can be quite amusing

I thought DS would never stop wetting. It magically happened when he was about 7.5. We used Huggies night time pants - and he would sometimes go through 2 per night so it was an expensive business! Younger DS stopped aged 3, so it felt so odd for DS1 to be carrying on long after his younger brother had stopped night time wetting, but as you’ll be told here, it truly is completely normal. It was helpful to me to be told that, where we are, no doctor would be interested until he was at least 8 so we just left it and didn’t let it worry him or us.

My son had not long turned 6 when he stopped wetting at night, he’s always been a very deep sleeper. I called the drs for an appointment and whilst waiting for it we got a bed wetting alarm. It’s a little device that they wear around their arm whilst sleeping and has a wire which you put through their pyjamas and attach to their underwear. It’s picks up any wetness and sounds the alarm to wake them up. It works by training their brain into recognising the signal of needing the toilet whilst sleeping. It came with a little chart for them to stick a sun or a rainy cloud on the following morning. By 12 weeks they should be dry. It took my son about 8 weeks before we started to get all sunny symbols! Got it from Amazon and would definitely recommend.

Quite amazingly, his brother who was 3 at the time started becoming dry at night and we’d not really noticed as all the focus was on the older one!