Potty Training at Night 5 Yo

Updated on July 18, 2011
Y.K. asks from Clifton, NJ
6 answers

My daughter is 5.5 yo still wearing diaper at night , even if I wake her up at night , mist likely she wakes up with a wet diaper in am. Is this any normal for a kid this age? My 3 yo does not wear diaper at night. What should I do about this? Should I be concerned ?

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A.N.

answers from New York on

I don't think you need to be concerned. This article will, I think, make you feel better about the situation.

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey...

Best wishes =o)

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P.M.

answers from Portland on

While most children's bodies do mature enough to stay dry at night by the time they are 4 or so, a fair number of children simply take a lot longer to reach that point. Most of those 'later' children will be dry somewhere during their elementary school years.

A few unlucky kids don't get there until puberty. It is not their fault, and there are no tricks or devices that help them get there faster. There is an alarm you can attach to a child's underwear and her bed that will wake her when she starts to pee, but this does not usually train her to wake up before she pees.

Avoiding drinking water before bed doesn't usually help, either. In fact I've seen one knowledgeable mom on this site suggest giving more water before bed to find out if that will make a full-bladder signal strong enough to wake the child during one of her lighter-sleep cycles. (There are light and heavy sleep cycles throughout the night, about every 1.5 hours.)

Your child is normal. Really, she would be very happy to be dry at night, if she could.

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G.B.

answers from Oklahoma City on

Totally normal. Some kids are still having night time accidents at age 10 or older. They cannot choose to wake up and go, it is not in their ability to do so.

It is a waste of time to try and wake her up, she is asleep, her brain is sending out the chemical to make her sleep, she cannot make her brain stop doing this. When her brain starts sending the right chemicals she will naturally wake up when she feels the urge.

But first the body must develop the recognition that those muscles in the sphincter area need to clench and hold the urine. That is also controlled by the impulses in the brain. She cannot, cannot, control these actions at this time.

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J.G.

answers from Springfield on

Nothing you can do but wait. You can mention it to your ped just so he/she can ask you questions to rule anything out, but more than likely it's just something she will grow out of. My niece was also 7 or 8, and she just had to wait until her body and brain were ready.

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J.F.

answers from Grand Rapids on

My daughter had trouble staying dry at night until she was about 7 or 8. The doctor said that for some children, the part of the brain that wakes them up when they have to go to the bathroom is just not mature yet. This is not abnormal. We eventually did get an alarm that snapped into her underwear and when it sensed any liquid, it would alarm and wake her, and the rest of us!, up. The theory is that after you brain gets used to being woken up when this happens, it will learn to do it on it's own, kind of like when you spend a long time being woken up at 5am with an alarm clock and then the morning you don't have to wake up, your body wakes up anyway. We just kept pull-ups on her, over her underwear, until she was reliably dry for many nights in a row. I think the alarm instructions said a month of dry nights. The reason we did this was she was getting to an age where she wanted to go to sleep overs and of course wearing a pull up to sleep overs is so not cool! Good luck and don't worry too much about it.

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R.Y.

answers from New York on

My 5.5 year old is also wearing goodnights at night. I'd rather deal with the pull up type diaper than do all the laundry. We tried him without it this summer. He may be dry for a few nights but not consistently yet. It's just a wait it out kind of thing. I worked at sleep away camp and even with 8-11 year olds we almost always had at least 1 bed wetter in a group of 30 girls (and it's even more common in boys).

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