Handling Teen Bedwetting

Does your teen wet his or her bed? Blaming the child would not help. Generally, bedwetting decreases as your teen's body matures. Until he or she outgrows bedwetting, you as a parent should give him encouragement and support.

Teens who have bedwetting problems often feel that it is their fault. They greatly hesitate invitations by their friends to spend a night with them or going to summer camps. If others will know that they have bedwetting problems, they feel ridiculed and   embarrassed.

Here are some tips to help your son or daughter cope with a teen bedwetting problem:

- Impose a rule in the family that no one should ridicule or tease a teen who wets his or her bed. Explain to family members, especially other siblings, that their sister or brother does not intend to wet the bed. Every time the troubled teen wets the bed, do not make it a big issue.

- Discuss with a pediatrician or doctor on how to help you and your teen understand the problem.

- Before bedtime, urge the teen that if he or she needs to go to the toilet and urinate. Keep amounts of fluid he or she drinks before bedtime at a minimum.

- You could also use an alarm device that could sense urine and wakes up the teen to go to the toilet. Make sure the alarm is rest before he or she goes back to the bed and sleep.

- Until the bedwetting stops, you could put a comfortable plastic cover or rubber between the mattress and the bed sheet. This would help prevent your bed from wet and smelling.

- Let your teen help. Try to encourage him or her to change the wet covers and sheets after the bedwetting. This will instill upon him or her responsibility. He or she will begin to think that the bedwetting should stop so that he or she doesn't have to change the bed covers and sheets often. Letting him or her do the chores would also relieve the teen from further embarrassment from other family members. However, if other family members think that this is a type of punishment, explain to them that it is not and in fact helping your teen cope with the problem.

- You could ask a doctor if he or she could recommend exercises to your teen that involves stretching the bladder. Bladder-stretching exercises would help your teen's bladder to hold more urine, thereby increasing the time between urinations.

- If there are no other treatments working, you consult with the doctor for a possible medication. Treating bedwetting using medications, however, is disputed. Other doctors think that since bedwetting generally stops as the teen begins to mature, medications may give more problems to the children than a solution to bedwetting.  Aside from possible side effects, medications may not also work.

Thus, your doctor might or might not recommend medication. But, if he or she prescribes one, be sure to ask him or her the reason for choosing that specific medication, the other choices available, their potential side effects, and the success rates of these.

- Since bedwetting is a problem experienced not only by your teen but others as well, there are numerous mail-order treatment services and tools peddling that they are the solution. Take these programs and devices with a grain of salt. Most of these products and services are costly yet do not solve the problem. Most of the time, they make false promises and claims. It is still the doctor that is the best source for information and advice. Before starting with any treatment service or device, ask your doctor first.

Bedwetting among teens should not be a heavy problem for you and your child. With parental supervision, teens who have bedwetting problems may go through this phase easily.