While catching up on episodes of ABC’s “This Is Us,” a little girl on the show enters her mommy and daddy’s room.
“Mommy, I peed the bed,” she says, solemnly.
“Okay,” says the mother calmly. Then she and her husband both get up to go change her sheets.
First of all, if this was my household, that would be me getting up solo because my husband sleeps like a corpse, and second, I’d be ranting about how she should know better than to be wetting her bed at 4 years old. I do this because I don’t want her thinking that it’s so easy for me to get up and change her mess in the middle of the night. Not only is it inconvenient the mattress starts smelling like a big old pee pee diaper, it’s so unnecessary. Just get up and go to the bathroom or call me from the other room. I also discourage this type of behavior because I loved the feeling of warm liquid cascading down my legs from peeing the bed growing up. Had it not been for my mother’s anger, I might still be doing it today.
But at the same time, I’m not oblivious to the fact that reacting with frustration and anger might not be the best thing to do. I do read.
So I call my friend Nicole who has a daughter around my daughter’s age to see how she reacts when her little girl does wets the bed. For her, wetting the bed hasn’t been so much a problem, but she does get frustrated when she feels her girls are being careless.
“Sometimes I get upset if they break things when I’ve specifically asked them to be careful,” she says. “But then my mom reminds me of all the things I broke growing up, and it calms me down,” she laughs.
It helps a little to know I’m not alone in my frustration, but still, what is an appropriate response?
“I think it’s most important that parents avoid criticizing their children and remember that everyone makes mistakes,” says psychologist Dr. Kristin Carothers. “Also, criticizing lowers a child’s self esteem and may strain the parent-child relationship. Stay calm. If it’s a mistake you notice your child making over and over again, it might be important to determine whether or not what you’re requiring is developmentally appropriate or if the child may be experiencing an underlying difficulty.”
Leave it to Dr. Kristin Carothers of The Child Mind Institute to give me something to think about.
I do a quick Google search to see when kids typically stop peeing the bed and discover a story about a 10-year-old boy who wets the bed every night. His parents tried alarms, medication- though it wasn’t suggested- waking him up 3-4 times a night, cutting off liquids, rewards, money…everything. They even thought he had a sleeping disorder but it turned out to be false. The best advice the parents got during that excruciatingly time was, “When he’s ready, he’ll stop.”
10 years old and still peeing the bed every night?!
I start thinking about my own daughter and how maybe she doesn’t “know better” at just four years old. Where did this idea that one should automatically stop peeing the bed at a certain age even come from? There are so many remnants left over from slavery when kids couldn’t be kids because one mistake could cost them their life. Then there’s this pressure for our kids to work twice as hard to be better than their white counterparts that doesn’t leave room for a lot of mistakes either. And here I am putting additional pressure on my baby girl who, wow, is down to 1-2 pees a week and she’s only four! Compared to that 10-year-old I have nothing to complain about.
The next time my daughter walks into our bedroom saying, “Mommy I wet the bed,” I say, calmly, “Okay.”
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