I was a bedwetter until I was 13 years old, and it wasn't a pleasant experience for me. I grew up in a single parent family with lots of siblings, so I endured a lot of painful humiliation. A wet bed in the morning meant for me a ritual of an embarrassing inspection and having my face pushed into the wet mattress while a spanking was applied to my backside.
At age 10, the announcement was made that I would be put back into diapers. There were no GoodNites® products in those days, so I was made to wear a thick cloth diaper with tight rubber pants that were made for toddlers and not 10-year-old boys. Needless to say, the sleeping arrangement was not comfortable. The diaper was so thick that oftentimes the pins would snap open and stick my legs, the toddler rubber pants were tight and binding and the diaper itself held the urine against my skin so that oftentimes I developed bad cases of painful diaper rash. This is to say nothing of the humiliation of trying to waddle about the house in front of babysitters or the friends of my siblings who often derided or teased me about being 10 and still in diapers.
The last year that I wet the bed (I was 13) was the worst because I endured every type of punishment in my parents' ill-founded belief that harsher punishments would cure me. I have never recovered emotionally from those punishments and probably never will. I get tired of hearing people say that bedwetting causes emotional and psychological problems for children. I don't believe it. Parents and their unreasonable expectations and responses to bedwetting are what causes psychological issues for kids. One hundred and fifty years ago they had a social custom known as "breeching," which was the rite of passage when boys were formally put into pants. Breeching happened when a boy was fully potty trained, and, surprisingly, the most common age for breeching was between 6 and 8 years old. In some families, it occurred as late as 12 years old. Folks of that age did not regard bedwetting as some kind of a degenerative disease or dysfunctional development. It was the normal course of development which, in those days, was respected.
Today I am the proud dad of six kids, five of whom still wet the bed. They wear GoodNites® [brand] products. They do not stay away from sleepovers, nor do they refuse other kids from sleeping over at our home. They go to camp. They do not try to hide the fact that they wet at night, and when kids ask them about the pants they wear at night, my children simply explain it to them in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way.
Guess what? The other kids respect them for it and they have never been teased – not even once – about it. My kids are leaders in their classrooms, in the community and in our church, and the fact that they wet their bed and choose to wear GoodNites® Underpants as a dignified solution to that issue is only one small aspect of their lives which, in the long run, doesn't mean a whole lot.
Finally, I am completing a second graduate degree and have chosen to write my thesis on the topic of school-aged bedwetting. I am emphasizing a healthy approach of management over treatment. There is no need to "treat" bedwetting. When a child's eyes or teeth are underdeveloped, you buy eyeglasses or get braces put on, but you don't put the child through a regiment of zany routines to try and rid him or her of the condition immediately. One doesn't do that because they know that eventually the eyes and teeth will be corrected. With bedwetting, you help the child live with it with dignity, and disposable underwear are the best bet for that.
