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Primary Enuresis
 by: Yana Mikheeva

Summer is over, and you again had no chance to have a vacation with your friends or at the sea, because of a very delicate reason. Your child still urinates in bed. What shall you do with wet bed-sheets in a train or at the hotel? When even staying at your relatives’ place seems to be so awkwardly…

And for the first time, parents call in question other people’s advices to stop worrying and wait patiently till a baby outstrips this problem by himself. May be enuresis should be treated nevertheless?

To wait or to treat?

If your baby is more than 5 y.o., and he still awakes in a wet bed, you should start treatment, and not to wait.

Primary enuresis, which accompanies your baby since the very birth, is caused by partial immaturity of his central nervous system. Immaturity prevents baby’s watch reflex from forming in time, until a baby is 5 y.o. This watch reflex makes baby awake, when he feels a necessity to evacuate in the night.

Of course, enuresis can pass through without treatment, but years and years will pass before baby’s central nervous system “ripens” without medical help.

And a child will contract lots of psychological problems during these years. As soon as you send him to a kindergarten, he’ll see that most of his coevals awake in a dry bed in the afternoon. Kindergarten child in wet panties becomes an object of ridicule at once. He begins to feel his inferiority keenly, becomes unsociable, isolates from other children or, on the contrary, becomes aggressive… And if the problem is not solved till he goes to school and his classmates will know about a wet bed…

Moreover, enuresis almost never comes alone. It always goes hand in hand with some other neurological pathology that can be determined in a diagnosis “minimal cerebral dysfunction”. So if your baby suffers from primary enuresis, probably, he also suffers from syndrome of deficiency of concentration and hyper-activity. And this means, he rushes along his life, sweeping away everything on his road, hardly giving you a moment of rest and causing other people’s resentment. If you don’t correct the situation in time, school will torment both you and your baby with claims.

Is a night watch necessary?

Some parents think that carrying a sleeping child to a chamber-pot a couple of times for the night will help to solve the problem more or less. In fact, this is not even a half measure, parents just protect bed-sheets. A baby won’t be able to develop a watch reflex, if he pisses in a chamber-pot in the night, being half asleep. Then it’s better to awake him completely, so that he could do everything consciously.

There’s even such a system: firstly parents awake a baby every 3 hours – this is time, necessary to child’s urinary bladder to fill. While awakening, in full consciousness, a child should go to a chamber-pot by himself. In 10 days, when you already have not to use a gun to awake your deeply sleeping child, awake him every 2 hours. In other 10 days – every hour. It is considered, this way you can also develop a watch reflex in your child.

But children don’t like this method. They don’t like to be awakened. And as many children suffering from enuresis are also hyper-active and excitable, they become absolutely uncontrollable after systematic not getting enough sleep. It’s also hard to imagine a parent who will endure a month of sleepless nights. So, it’s better to act under a doctor’s guide, traditionally.

A psychoneurolog will prescribe your child medicines, stimulating nervous system development: medicines among sedatives, anti-depressants, nootrops… Reflexive acupuncture and hypnosis are also efficient… However, there’s no panacea: if a doctor “hits the mark”, and after first weeks of treatment your child awakes dry every morning – you’re lucky. Most often, it’s necessary to try several methods before success comes. And success means that your child had no wet nights during a year. Then you can be assured: a watch reflex has developed, there’s no enuresis any more.

About The Author

Yana Mikheeva is the creator of the Baby-Health.Net at http://www.baby-health.net.

Are you going to get pregnant? Visit our friendly resource and read information on pregnancy and parenting, painless childbirth, growth and development of a baby, baby health, safety, signs of pregnancy.

She also has a blog for women at http://www.womanspassions.com/blog/

This article was posted on April 03, 2006

 

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