If I could give parents only one piece of bedwetting advice, it would be to never punish your child for wetting the bed. Punishment won’t fix the problem, and it will make your child feel downright awful. In the end, I suspect that parents who punish their children for wetting the bed wind up feeling pretty lousy, too.
A child who wets the bed isn’t simply being lazy.
In the vast majority of cases, they’re either very deep sleepers and/or they have an underdeveloped bladder. Punishing a child for wetting the bed will no more solve the problem than would grounding a child for having an asthma attack.
Sometimes parents think that bedwetting is a form of “acting out.” They feel like some sort of punishment will show their child that bedwetting is an unacceptable way of expressing their feelings. Again, children who wet the bed aren’t doing it on purpose. It follows, then, that punishment won’t put an end to the bedwetting.
Also, punishing your child will increase the feelings of shame associated with bedwetting. They’ll feel like they’re somehow a bad person. Emotional stress could actually make the problem worse. Occasionally, all kids willingly do things we consider outright gross, like eating crayons or covering themselves in mud from head to toe. Despite our child’s delight in the periodic yuck factor, no child would choose to wet the bed.
It’s already an unpleasant experience for everyone.
The best approach is to find some way to shift the focus from “You failed because you wet the bed last night” to “Yay! You made it through the night dry!” Be sure to sign up for your free copy of “Got a Bedwetter? Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid” by visiting www.bedwettinghelpformoms.com.
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