Dear Mr. Dad: My 8-year old still wets her bed at night. She’s really embarrassed about it and doesn’t want to have sleepovers, either at our home or—especially—anywhere else. She’s really stressed about it, which I imagine is just making the problem worse. How common is it for an 8-year old to be wetting her bed at night? How can we figure out what’s causing the problem? And is there anything we can do to help her stay dry?
A: The simple answer to your first question is that it’s not uncommon. Most children don’t make it through the night completely dry until age 4 or 5, and about 7% of 8-year olds are bedwetters. Boys are twice as likely as girls to wet the bed, and it’s a lot more common among the children of parents who had the same troubles as kids. The good news is that about 95% of kids are dry by age 10.
In most cases, there’s no identifiable cause of the bedwetting (according to many experts, only about 1% of bedwetting is caused by an underlying medical condition). However, some children may wet the bed (or start again after being dry for six months or more) because of stress or anxiety caused by a major life event, such as the birth of a new sibling, moving to a new home, or mom and dad getting a divorce. In addition, as you suspect, the internally generated shame she’s feeling could definitely be aggravating the problem, as could any external shame coming from teasing or punishments.
Here are a few things you can do to help make your daughter’s nights dryer.
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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
