In the past I’ve written about the problems we’ve had with J not being dry at night. For some time now we have been doing without night-time nappies, unless we are away from home from the night and then we sometimes do just to reduce the chance of an embarrassing accident.
Most of the time we have achieved this largely by lifting J. Whilst I regard that as cheating really – you can’t say your child is dry at night if you are lifting them as it is you making sure they are dry and not them. For us it was a useful thing to do though as J felt nappies or pyjama pants were babyish and he preferred to avoid them. Recently, though we have stopped lifting him and he has still been mostly dry.
I think this means that his body is now producing enough vasopressin, the hormone that reduces urine production at night. So this is a step in the right direction, but he is not waking to signals from his bladder. The other night he had an accident at 5am and I expect a few more before we are done. Hopefully those signals from the bladder will start to come through a bit stronger soon, so that we can say goodbye to wet sheets.
It’s been a long haul and at 9 J is still having a few problems. It has had an impact on his life: he has turned down cub camps because of it. Thankfully our school doesn’t do a residential until the last year of primary, so I’m really hoping he will be over it completely by then.
I do think there is far too much expectation about being dry at night at an early age. The problem is though is that J is afraid of being teased by his peers and I’m guessing that parents of kids who don’t have a problem, don’t really address this issue. Ho hum!
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