Bedwetting is an occurrence that is embarrassing, awkward, and disturbing for both parents and children. This is a condition that mostly affects kids in the five-years-old range, but can also strike children as old as fifteen. When properly handled, bedwetting can be treated without future incident. There is no single cause leading to bedwetting, but there are many different factors that contribute to the act, including excessive drinking right before bedtime or a bladder infection.

Food items that contain caffeine have been known to cause excessive urination. One of the culprits in this category that affects children is chocolate. Whether they receive it as a treat before bedtime or worse, enjoy a cup of hot cocoa, the caffeine within these items can act as a stimulant throughout your child’s body. When caffeine is combined with sugar, the duo can be impossible on a child with a sensitive bladder.

There’s just something about those bubbles that gets the body going and if you don’t have a fully developed bladder to handle the carbonation, your child may be in for unpleasant results. This is also true with other drinks, such as Gatorade, which literally seems to run right through drinkers of all ages. Sometimes, doctors will suggest that you even cut down the amount of water that a child drinks throughout the day. While adults are encouraged to consume 64 ounces on a daily basis, your child really only needs about 50% of that.

The water content within citrus fruits, such as oranges and grapefruits is quite high. Not only that, but the substantial levels of acid have been known to disrupt a sensitive bladder, causing the need to urinate in the middle of the night. When a bladder is not trained to respond to these urges, bedwetting occurs.

Had a late dinner and your child really loves the extra salsa on their taco? The ingredients within the salsa, as well as in other spicy foods may contribute to bedwetting. Spicy foods have been known to speed up the elimination processes within the body.

There are a few common food items that have been known to create spasms within the bladder, which can lead to bedwetting. You’re child may be having an allergic reaction to something they have eaten when a bedwetting occurrence like this arises. Food products that often trigger these nighttime events include corn, eggs, peanuts, wheat, dairy, and soy. Other types of foods to avoid just before bedtime are those that feature high doses of artificial colors, preservatives, and sweeteners.
 

When it becomes hard to keep your child away from certain foods that may trigger their bedwetting, you might want to consider using a variety of behavioral techniques to encourage a better response. For children over the age of seven, a bedwetting alarm may be used. It has been known to produce positive results in a relatively high percentage of children. In younger kids, a reward system for keeping the bed dry may work, which encourages your child to avoid the foods that may trigger bedwetting. As the child gets older, when they are told to change their own wet bed sheets, they might try extra hard to avoid this chore by any means necessary.

Bladder training is a useful tool when coping with urinary incontinence. Urinary incontinence means that you have trouble controlling when you urinate, and is often caused by weak pelvic muscles, build up of stools in the bowels, or a side effect from taking certain medications.

Urinary incontinence can also happen when you have medical conditions such as diabetes or congestive heart failure. There are many people who suffer from the discomfort of not being able to control their passing of urine, in fact about 12 million people in America alone suffer from it, the main sufferers are women over the age of 50. Although anyone regardless of age or gender can suffer from urinary incontinence. T

here are four main types of urinary incontinence; these are stress incontinence, urge incontinence, overflow incontinence, or functional incontinence. Can Bladder training help? Bladder training is a technique used to help people who suffer from stress incontinence, urge incontinence or mixed incontinence, which can be a combination of the two.

Stress incontinence happens when urine escapes because the person has put pressure on their lower tummy muscles. Often coughing, sneezing, laughing, or lifting something heavy can trigger stress incontinence Urge incontinence is when the need to go to the toilet comes on very suddenly, and you don’t have enough warning to get to the bathroom. By visiting your doctor, you can discuss the type of symptoms that you have and your doctor can tell you the type of urine incontinence you have and if bladder training will help you.

What bladder training will do is give you more time between trips to the bathroom, by increasing the amount of urine that the bladder can hold. Bladder training will also improve the control that you have over your urge to urinate. Your doctor will be able to put you onto a bladder control program. Firstly, you will need to keep track of how many times, and how much urine is passed in a 24-hour period.

You may also have to keep track of how many leaks that you have during the day; through the program, this will give you an idea of how well bladder training is working for you.

Depending on the type of urinary incontinence you suffer from, your doctor may put you on one of a few training programs including strengthening exercises, slowly increasing the amount of time between trips to the bathroom, until you only need to urinate every 4-5 hours, or by placing you on a scheduled bathroom trip program.

Bladder training will usually take up to 12 weeks for you to get the desired results, but in the end, it will be worth it. Other ways to help with your bladder training is to change your diet. Some things in your diet such as spicy foods, alcohol, or caffeine can irritate your bladder, by avoiding these foods, you can get better results faster from your bladder training program.

Children and adults require plenty of fluids through the day to keep them hydrated and to promote healthy liver and kidney function. Many parents come to the conclusion that if their child is urinating during the night, that maybe they should limit the overall amount of fluids that the child consumes in order to make less urine in the body, and reduce the chance of the child wetting the bed.

This is not the case, and fluids should never be removed in order to fix a child’s bed wetting problem. Fluid management should be carefully monitored. Making sure the child has the required amount of eight glasses of fluids spaced out evenly through the day can do this.

Often older children forget to drink during the day, and after they return home from school, they do the majority of their drinking late in the day. Parents should discourage children from doing this. By giving children, a cold bottle of water to take to school each day will encourage them to drink more often through the day.

There is one time that parents may need to restrict the amount of fluids that a child drinks; this is just before bed, around about two hours before. By reducing the amount of fluids, the child drinks will reduce the amount of fluids in the child’s bladder, and hopefully help the child stay dry through the night.

Parents need to keep in mind that children do still get thirsty at night time, and if a child is thirsty at night, they should still be allowed to drink fluids, just not large amounts before bed.

Children should avoid sugary, fizzy, or caffeine infused drinks at all times, especially at night before bed. Caffeine contains diuretics, which cause the body to urinate more often, and sugars do little for the fluid levels. These drinks will actually make the child thirstier.

Parents should take special care to explain to their children that by spacing drinks evenly throughout the day, and not having one big drink all at once they can help to reduce the likelihood of wetting the bed. By involving the child in the process, they will feel more in control, have a better understanding of why they should space their drinks, and cut down their drinking before bed.

Additionally parents should encourage their children to stop wetting the bed by offering them incentives and praise, rather than criticizing them or making the child feel like they have done something wrong by wetting the bed. It is also important for parents to openly discuss the child’s bed wetting problem and ask them if they experience pain or discomfort when going to the toilet. In rare cases, bladder infections or early onset of diabetes may be the cause of unexplained bed-wetting.

Parents who have a child that wets the bed need to approach the problem in the correct way. Talk openly about bed-wetting, and be prepared to reassure the child that the problem can be overcome.

Praise is very important to children, and will encourage them to try harder. Most of all remember never to make your child feel bad about their bedwetting problem; punishment or criticism may make the problem worse by putting stress on the child.

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Below are five tips for helping your child get through the night without wetting the bed, these are:

1. Always make sure that the child goes to the toilet before bed, make this a regular routine for going to bed. It is not always a good idea to wake the child and send them to the toilet before the parent goes to bed, in some cases this can cause a child to wet the bed as they will get used to passing urine before their bladder is full.
2. Another part of the ‘bed time ritual’ that can help overcome bed-wetting is to limit the amount of fluids that a child has around two hours before bed. Although this can be very helpful for night times, it will not help children who have problems with wetting themselves during the day.

   Children should continue drinking up to 8 cups of fluids spaced out through out the day, and should avoid caffeine infused drinks at all times, especially during the night as caffeine has a urine producing effect on the body.

3. A light on in the toilet will encourage children to visit the toilet in the night. If they wake up with a full bladder having easy access to the toilet will make it easier for them to find their way, and use the toilet.
4. If there has been an ‘accident’, parents should encourage the child to go back into their bed after the sheets have been changed. By using a plastic protector between the sheets and mattress, this will make changing the bed easy and stop the smell of urine in the mattress.
5. Praise is so important with children, and so is recognition of progress. Every opportunity available parents should make a point of telling their children how well they are doing and noting how hard they are working to overcome their bed-wetting problem.

A chart that keeps record of a child’s dry nights will help them psychologically to want to succeed, and a parent can create an award system for reaching a number of dry nights in a row.