My daughter is now three and a half. She’s fully potty trained, aside from the very rare occasional accident. But she wears a diaper to bed every night, although not for naps. We have her pee before going to bed, but she’s always wet in the morning.
Now, I bet if we stopped putting a diaper on her, and she experienced the discomfort of being wet in the middle of the night, she’d learn to get up and use the potty. Except who wants to clean her bed every day? That’s a lot of laundry. And who wants to get up in the middle of the night to tend to a crying wet child and a soaked bed?
However, I suspect that many times she doesn’t pee until after she wakes up, discovers that her bladder is full, and decides to pee in her diaper rather than use the potty. I always ask her if she needs to pee in the morning, and she never does. And of course, right now she has a 3 month old baby sister, so it’s probably not a good time to push potty training to a new level. Waiting until the baby is older is probably a good idea.
So, how old were your kids when they stopped wearing diapers at night? What strategies did you use to transition to underwear at night?
Having gone through this twice (and facing the prospect of a third time), you’d think I’d remember better. I’m going to say fourish. Of course, kid number 2, with her bladder the size of a walnut, was, even out of diapers, a little accident prone – for a long time. I can’t quite remember the strategy, either. I think once they kept a diaper dry through the night, that was the end of it. We dabbled a little with pull-ups, but it didn’t amount to much. And there may have been a reward involved.
Honestly, the way I’m answering, a person could conclude that I had forgotten the last ten years of my existence.
My mother says that between the age that my brother was potty trained and about 5 or 6, Dad would get him out of bed in the middle of the night, take him to the bathroom, and return him to bed. My brother would not remember it in the morning. Dad almost always has to get up in the middle of the night to pee, so making sure my brother did as well was not a problem.
My niece age 3 quit getting “night panties” on her third birthday, a few monthes ago. I don’t know if she’s staying dry at night now, or not. I just know that her parents were tired of her sneaking around and changing the night panties without telling anyone. They also suspected that she was using them (rather than the potty) after she woke up in the morning rather than during the night while asleep.
My nephew stopped Pull-Ups at night around 4ish I believe, but I have heard boys take longer to get through the night than girls. One thing another set of friends did while waiting was put 2 layers of sheets on the bed at night, with a rubber one or a pad in between. Then when there was an accident, they just stripped off one layer and there was a new layer waiting underneath.
I have seen transition pants at the store that absorb like diapers but allow the child to feel wet when they go in them, so it is not as comfy to go in as a diaper. Maybe something like that would help if you think your daughter is able to hold it but going in the diaper because it is easier. The sensation of feeling wet might be what it takes.
My older boy was dry by three during the day but peed in bed every single night until he was nearly six. He is a very heavy sleeper and he seemed to pee an entire bladderful at about 5am. We tried taking the diapers off but he was so upset and remorseful that it seemed mean, so the diapers went back on without comment until he dried out naturally.
The younger boy was much quicker, about fourish, but well past his birthday.
We did have one incident soon after his night diapers were dispensed with when we had two young single women staying with us. We talked until the early hours of the morning, and suddenly little one woke up and yelled “I need to pee!” I didn’t get there in time, and got to the foot of the stairs to see kid standing at the top, eyes closed and swaying, and an absolute RIVER pouring down the stairs, hitting the wall at the turn and then bouncing down the second flight to where I was standing. I turned round to see the girls standing there, mouths open, “We are SOOO never having kids!” written all over their faces.
So, in short, I’d leave the night diapers on a while longer!
Five for both our kids - and I want to say a late five. My daughter is 6 1/2 now and hasn’t had an accident in months, but does if she isn’t reminded to try before bedtime.
I was a bedwetter until 12. And it was horrible. So we didn’t push ours at all. Basically, when the pullup started showing dry more often than not, we tried without the pullup. My son had maybe three accidents over a month or so and that was it. My daughter had then more often, and still wears pull ups if it will be inconvient for her to wet (camping, sleepovers, anywhere where the sheet isn’t covered with a plastic cover.)
In my mind, pullups for just nighttime are fairly cheap, washing bedding every day is a pain in the butt, and unless your kid is really motivated to stop wearing them (sleepovers at friends homes - which doesn’t seem to really start until six or so anyway), its easiest just to take the whole “most kids outgrow this before they move into the dorm” approach.
Perhaps, as I’ve been inclined all along, my son is special! We used pre-school as the dangling carrot for potty training. He couldn’t go to pre-school in diapers. It was the rule. He started school right at 3 years old. He did wear pull-ups to school for maybe the first half year. Then I started telling him how I was gonna tell the other boys that he wore diapers to sleep in. He really didn’t want that. He was sans diapers at all times prior to age four. Now for the baby…
Our daughter was dry at night around the age of three, only after we stopped using pullups at night. The few accidents she had right after stopping the pullups just helped her learn better how to avoid them. (It was a mutual decision to stop using pullups, BTW.)
Our son took much longer–in part because he’s a boy, and in part because he has muscle development problems, and in part because just when he was learning to use the potty, he broke his femur and was in a body cast for more than a month. We had to start all over again after that. I think he was five before we stopped using pullups completely, but it still took him a few more months to get control at night. He’s eleven now, and he still has accidents every 3-4 months.
As for changing sheets in the middle of the night—
Urine is essentially sterile. Yes it does smell, but it will not make the child sick if you can’t change the sheets immediately. (Our son rarely wakes up when he has an accident at night, so we don’t always know about it until the next morning.)
You can get a waterproof mattress cover to protect the mattress from accidents, if you haven’t already. Then what we did was layer sheets and waterproof crib pads so that if there was an accident that had to be taken care of at night, all we had to do was tear off the wet sheet and crib pad, and put the child back to bed on a clean sheet that was already there. Our son sometimes had 2-3 accidents at night when we first started this, so we had three layers on the bed for a while.
While there is a certain amount of laundry involved, washing sheets is probably cheaper than buying diapers or pullups, if you have a washer and dryer at home. We would throw the wet sheets into the washing machine in the morning (often with other laundry that needed cleaning anyway), then into the dryer when we got home in the afternoon. We would put them back on the bed at bedtime that night.
This is probably a good place to recommend one of those nighttime alarm things – at least for older kids (maybe six and up?). It’s basically a moisture sensor that goes in the kid’s underwear, and we’ve found it very effective against bedwetting – which I think is a problem more widespread than is realized. To put it another way, getting the kid out of diapers at night is sometimes not the end of the process.
My boys both slept in pull-ups until about the time they turned 5. We stopped putting pull-ups on them when they wet the bed less than once a week.
When I went to buy a waterproof mattress pad for the first time, I was highly amused to see the picture on the package cover: An old lady, a little kid and a puppy lounging on a mattress.
My little girl turned three in January and is just now starting to wake up dry. We reward her for being dry and don’t punish her when she is wet, she just doesn’t get the reward.
The biggest thing was her realizing that as soon as she wakes up she needs to go potty, not lie in bed and wait or she’ll go in her pull-up.
I did buy one of those training pants (made by kooshies) that is washable and re-usable. We tried it for a week but she didn’t seem to be getting it so we went back. If she is dry for a week we’ll try again.
We potty trained our older daughter when she was almost 4, using pull-ups only at night. Now she’s 4 1/2 and is dry maybe 3-4 mornings a week. We’re not in a rush to get her out of the pull-ups, so we’ll probably just let nature take its course.
Our younger daughter is 2 1/2, and during the day she tells us when she has to pee, and she uses the toilet. She hasn’t mastered #2 on the toilet yet, so she still gets diapers. We’ll be training her this summer because she starts pre-school in the fall, and diapers are verboten.
My sleep deprived brain can’t recall the ages the kids were so I’ll have to guess.
The twins are almost 5 now and were just under 4-1/2 when they started school. In preparing for it, we made sure they were without diapers during the day well before that, certainly by 3-1/2 (just after they were 3-1/2 we drove to Florida for Christmas and I asked them to wear diapers for the drive and while not pleased, did not seem too offended…I think they were still dry after the 18 hour trip).
Once they were comfortable with underwear during the day, and frequent dry diapers in the morning, they asked to wear underwear to bed. There have been a few accidents (son more than daughter, probably a total less than a dozen) and we got up to change the sheets and waterproof pad at 2AM. I can’t recall the last time that happened…probably within 2-3 months of them starting to wear underwear to bed.
The problem is that now that they sleep with underwear and are comfortable getting up in the middle of the night to use the toilet (nightly daughter, sometimes son) they come wake us up to ask us to take them to the washroom…at 2-3AM, hence the sleep deprived brain.
My 5-1/2 year old nephew is a different story. He was toilet trained after he had started school (he started before he was 4) and wore training pants to bed until he was almost 5. He still has problems with going to the washroom, but it’s behavioural…sometimes he doesn’t want to stop playing to go so he’ll just soil himself and keep playing (until mom finds out).
My son is 11.5 and still occasionally wets. He wasn’t out of nighttime pullups until 7ish - and even then had (and continues to have) fairly frequent accidents. Then again, he’s autistic, and wasn’t out of daytime pullups until nearly 7. Plus a strong family history of extended bedwetting.
My daughter wasn’t really ready to try to go overnight until she was 5+. She was sometimes (often?) dry when she first got up even before then but if we didn’t hustle her to the bathroom right away, she’d figure “what the hell” and go ahead and pee in the pullups.
We still encourage them to wear pullups/goodnights when travelling.
Both my kids are/were on the later end of things, obviously.