Fret for eighteen more months that your kid will be in diapers when you drop him off at the dorm…wake up one morning to a kid who announces he isnt a baby any more.
As to bribes, at one point my son was so used to hearing me try and bribe my daughter to train that he promised I’d buy her a vw beetle. What works will work, but nothing works on all children all the time, and if you start throwing too many solutions at it too see what will stick, you’ll create that interpersonal control issue you don’t want.
Obviously, right now it’s totally normal and will be for quite some time, so definitely don’t worry. Learning to wake up when you need a wee usually magically sorts itself out, IME. I worked for a long time with kids with severe traumas etc, and many of them wet the bed even when they were much older, so my tips are partially for more severe cases and also older children, just to bear in mind.
Plastic sheet under the normal sheet to protect the mattress (if there isn’t one already). At some point it will become possible to sleep without nappies, but accidents do happen.
Get up in the night to take your son to the bathroom. This normalises emptying the bladder on the toilet. You soon get to know what times will be necessary. Some kids need to go up to every two hours, but it does get better.
At a slightly later age, start waking them up properly when you take them to the toilet so that they become aware of the wake-up-go-toilet-process.
At a later age, start talking about taking charge of the situation. This includes helping with clean-up (just a little and in a happy way, it shouldn’t be a massive negative thing). You can talk about remembering to wake up in the night if you need a wee.
If the problem persists some things that help are setting an alarm clock together, maybe buying a nice alarm clock. Also a really good exercise is lying on the bed, closing your eyes and pressing gently on your bladder. That’s what it feels like when you need a wee in the night! Try to tell your body that if you feel that, you need to wake up! It sounds silly, but it works. It’s just about learning to wake when you feel that sensation, and practicing it right before bedtime can help.
I think all this stuff is waaaay premature for your situation though. Bed wetting at three is completely normal and usually just magically sorts itself out after a while. Children usually just naturally learn that the bladder-full sensation means toilet, and wake up because of that. It just takes some time to become ingrained.
This is what I think exactly. We made the mistake of trying to force our son. Key word: trying. Finally, when he was just over 3 and we’d been making each other miserable for nearly 6 months over potty training, I told him, “You know what? I’m not asking again. You tell me when you’re ready. This is what you get if you go to the potty: you can go to preschool where they sometimes take field trips on the school bus. If you don’t want to go, it’s no big deal. You’ll just have to wait a little longer for that school bus. I trust you to tell me when you’re ready.” Four days later he was fully potty trained. Just that simple act of handing over the reins was what did it.
With my daughter, she’s 2.5 now and was potty trained for all of 1.5 weeks. Then one day she decided it was fun while it lasted, but she just didn’t feel like it anymore. I’m encouraging her to go and offering her use of the potty every hour or so, but she’s just not interested.
We ran our son through the training and he had absolutely no interest in giving up diapers until he found out he couldn’t take swimming lessons if he was still in diapers. He stopped wearing them that day.