Anonymous wrote:I mean, come on.
You know this isn’t common.
You know most 9 year olds are not wetting the bed.
However, your daughter is having this issue, so you support her the best you can. Keeping diapers discreetly stored in her room and having mattress protectors are good approaches. In general, I don’t think bed alarms are helpful. She’ll outgrow this eventually.
It happens to more of them than you realize, but because people are so judgmental, they keep it quiet.
I wet the bed consistently until 9 and after that off and on even into high school. I changed my own sheets and did my own laundry -- my parents don't even realize how long it went on. I was very embarrassed and ashamed.
As an adult, I've learned it's way more common than I thought it was. I thought I was the only one. I know a couple who both had this experience as kids and it was actually something they bonded over when they started dating because both of them, like me, thought they were alone in it.
Agree that the best course is just to support your kid and provide them with the tools they need to deal with it. I am on the fence about bed alarms, I think it depends what the issue is. Some kids I think are just deep sleepers whose bodies don't wake them up. For me, it often happened to me when I was half awake, but it's like my brain couldn't get my body to move to go to the bathroom. It just took me time to listen to the voice in my head saying "to to the bathroom." I actually also have this problem when I'm awake and will delay using the bathroom longer than I should because it's just hard to get myself to actually do it. I've talked to a neurologist about it and he said that sometimes people with ADHD experience this, a side effect of the hyper fixation, distractibility, or procrastination issues that people with ADHD deal with. I've never been formally tested for ADHD but that could be it. Anyway, I actually think a bedwetting alarm might have helped me for this reason -- just something to jolt me into getting up.