Hi guys this is Dr. Michael Dody and we are here for a seminar: Put Bedwetting to Bed and I am super excited about getting and in doing this the seminar because we do a lot of pediatric stuff. For those you don’t know me I’m a chiropractor in Littleton Colorado and we’ve been doing a lot of educational stuff especially around pediatrics and this is a topic that, if it affects you, it is definitely a serious issue and we want to make sure that you have some strategies to help yourself and help your kids deal with this bed wetting. And I am super excited to have somebody helping us out today that we were blessed to meet through my daughter Abigail, went to Patience was her teacher in preschool and my wife Heather went to one of Patience’s potty training classes and let me tell you I wish we would have went to it earlier because it absolutely changed the way that we did potty training for Lucy. And Lucy is not even a year old and she’s already completely potty-trained. So Patience has been amazing and she is a early childhood development specialist and she has a business called the family room here in Denver Colorado and let me tell you you are going to learn some stuff from Patience.
So welcome Patience and thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be able to do this with you.
Awesome. Yeah something I’m super excited thank you. So we’re gonna get into and I’m just going to kind of ask you some questions and get your expertise around the problem of bed wetting with kids and any any information that you definitely cam let us know, but obviously this can be a pretty universal problem. So tell me a little bit about what you know as far as the the background of bed wetting and some of the symptoms that we see.
Sure. So um bed waiting is an unfortunately very common problem in the United States. We don’t really worry about bedwetting until children are really over 3 and then even then we give them some leeway because sometimes, you know, it’s just a matter of development of size of the kids, size of their bladder and gaining and making sure that all that control is in place. But you know, children – there are millions of children in the US who have this issue and there’s lots of different reasons why it can happen. But it’s an involuntary response of releasing of the bladder during sleep. And it’s not something that children do purposefully, it’s something that it’s embarrassing and frustrating for both the child and the rest of the family.
Yeah it definitely makes a lot of sense because I know that, you know when you have this issue, it definitely can be really tough. Now, and I don’t know about your experience do you notice that this happens more with boys than girls or is that something that I’ve also known. Is that true?
So we do see it more often with boys but that probably has more to do with the fact that we tend to wait longer to toilet train boys. There’s a belief that it you know they take longer, it’s harder and it’s going to be more difficult and to wait and so yes more boys tend to have bed wetting issues than girls do, but that isn’t necessarily based on a biological difference between girls and boys. Because there are plenty of girls who deal with this issue as well.
Okay awesome. Yeah that makes sense that, you know, with how we’re actually you know doing the potty training it definitely makes a make sense of that would be the case. So now I’ve put up some commonly suggested solutions you know that we talked about as far as like waterproof sheets, alarm systems and stuff – what have you found do do these work or what what have you found as far as some of the solutions that you’ve seen out there.
Yeah so these really are common suggestions made to families who are dealing with this issue. So you know putting on water proof covers to protect the sheets, putting layers and layers of covers on so that when there’s accidents you know you can strip it down and get the kid back to sleep easily. Setting alarm system so that you can go you know the child can be roused up if they’re not rousing and they’re just asleep very deeply asleep which is causing the issue. Watches or alarms for older children to be reminded that they need to go. Avoiding too many fluids especially toward the end of the day to try to limit the need to go to the bathroom through the night. Those are the ones that are sort of most common given. Reward systems are ones that parents often will use first, thinking that they can sort of incent a child to stop doing it which because it’s not really a voluntary or a chosen behavior, it’s usually a deeper cause than that – reward systems are typically pretty ineffective. Some of the other suggestions and tools can be helpful depending on exactly why the child is having the issue. And then there’s the medical side where you can you know go and get prescribed medications that help prevent involuntary urination but those are usually really harsh and hard on the system. And cause often more side effects than helpful effects.
So I agree with you there that’s what my experience has been with that as well.cCn I just double click on something like the drink don’t drink too much – what is your take on that I mean is is that is that really the issue or is it is that does that actually help i don’t i’m not sure like you know we don’t have this issue so I what is that it’s something that really does affect urination at night involuntarily?
So for younger children who have smaller bladders, if they’re drinking a large large amounts of fluid during the day and in the evening it can make it more difficult for them just to have the capacity to hold the fluids through the night. Which is causing them to wet, but that’s typically for children who are much younger. We’re you know we’re looking at three four and five-year-olds where limiting their fluids may help. But they have to be drinking a lot of fluid, a lot of water a lot of juice a lot of milk over you know 20 to 30 ounces in the second half of the day for this to really be the cause of why a child is wetting and reducing it usually we need to reduce their intake anyway in order to encourage them to eat. Because those children often just drink instead of eat. And that can sometimes lead to bed wetting but again that’s not the major cause for most bed wetting issues.
Awesome yeah then that makes sense. You know and also kind of like you know going on to that medications you know what I some of the side effects that I’ve read for some of these medications are things like you know nausea stomach pain you things like insomnia which you know that’s not great for parents – even they don’t sleep – headaches things like that even anxiety stuff that’s going on with some of the side effects of the medications that they prescribe for bedwetting which I know as a parent of two young ones , I don’t know if I would want any of those side effects for daughters for sure.
So right that are those side effects really better than having to deal with wet sheets?
Exactly.
Oone that isn’t listed here that I have actually have heard urologists recommend is actually voluntary holding during the day in order to try to stretch the size of the bladder which as you can imagine can cause some very interesting complications and teaching children to hold it instead of release during the day as well as cause stomach pains and other medical issues from this holding the urine in for too long.
Yeah yeah that kinda sounds a little scary sometimes too. So what, lets some kind of just dive into the what you’ve seen as far as the effectiveness of some of like the way things are done with that. I know everybody’s pretty unique. So tell me a little bit what you’ve noticed as far as effectiveness of some of these strategies.
So, the problem with all of these strategies is that they’re dealing simply with the symptom of bed wetting. Bedwetting is sort of the external result of usually something else that’s going on either, you know, physically or psychologically happening with the child. So whereas in some cases these techniques that deal with, you know, waking up to go or, you know, allowing the child to wet so that it wakes them up and reminds them that they need to go to the bathroom in some cases can help. Most of the time they’re very ineffective because they don’t deal with the cause, they just deal with the symptom, the external showing of whatever the root cause or the problem is. And since we’re not addressing that problem, it really doesn’t do a very good job of taking care of the bedwetting issue.
Now that makes a lot of sense. So with that said why does bedwetting occur? I mean you know, what is the root cause behind that?
Yeah you know there’s a lot of different reasons that children wet the bed. There’s that they’re um they’re stressed is a really big reason. A large sense of stress we sometimes forget, we think young children have this you know life of ease and things that they have to worry about. But the things for us that sometimes seems silly for them can be very stressful and really hard on them. An example for that is we were traveling last summer with our family, doing a road trip, and we were coming to the end of our trip. And we were staying with some family and my ten-year-old had been having just a hard time. He was missing his home, he was missing his pets he was just really having a hard time and ready to be home and ended up wetting the bed when we were on vacation, which he hadn’t really ever done ever in his entire life. But he was just so stressed and that stress really does impact the way that our pelvic floor talks to the rest of our body. So stress is a huge cause that often doesn’t get enough importance played for young children and how to ease the stress that they’re feeling.
Definitely agree on that for sure. Now we were talking a little bit about, like you know, some of the neurology of this too and we were talking you know specifically about bed wetting and the the phrenic reflex and stuff and I know you talk about that in you know your potty training as well just about the development of neurology – is that also can that be some of the underlying cause?
Yeah in fact I think there’s a lot of – this is a huge cause for a lot of toileting and especially bed wetting issues is the communication of the pelvic floor to the brain and back and forth. Is the message getting sent strong enough? Is it getting sent fast enough? Is it being sent back fast enough so that the child can hold it and respond based on what’s going on with the nervous system in the body? And there’s a lot of things that can happen just with the alignment of the body being out of place that can affect blood flow to that area, pinched nerves, all those kinds of things can play a huge impact in the ability for the brain and the pelvic floor to talk to each other so that the releasing and holding can happen appropriately. M
akes a lot of sense yeah absolutely. I know that you wanted to definitely stress that kids don’t want to wet the bed and I know that that is a big thing. I sometimes, you know, we have parents that come in and are so frustrated by this but you know you know what it really isn’t the kids wanting to do this.
Yeah who wants to wet themselves? Most children have a huge amount of shame and guilt associated with it and try their best to avoid it and feel awful and feel bad. And sometimes if we put it on them as if they’re doing something wrong then we can increase their stress, throw off their hormones and sort of cause impact and compound the issue instead of make it better.
Yeah that makes that absolutely. Tell me a little bit about the impacted bowels we talked a little bit about that too.
Yeah so this is a really interesting thing is what can happen often especially with children who are having some sort of toileting issues is that they often will hold or not release all of the way and so you can get back up in your bowel of just you know poop residue that hasn’t been able to pass completely. And it accumulates and it grows. It does very interesting things inside the body that causes pressure on the bladder which then makes it very difficult for a child not to have urination involuntarily.
That’s very interesting I had not heard that, but you know after doing a little bit more looking into it, it can be a one major issue in the bedwetting incidences. That’s real interesting.
And you know we talked about subluxation and I guess that’s kind of my area of expertise, and that gets back into the neurology of it. The fact that that nervous system being the master system that controls and coordinates, for example, the bladder and the emptying and the – you know all of the portions of what’s going on with that, you know, definitely is is a major major part that when there’s some misalignment. And that’s what I often find with with kids is after you know running around playing on the playground and falling down learning to walk all these things that that cause physical and the physical stresses along with the other stresses you were talking about definitely can cause misalignment and cause stress on those nerves. And then the organ, specifically the bladder, doesn’t receive those signals that they need to do things properly. So that is another thing that we see here at the clinic as well with, you know why, it does occur. Let’s move on to the the first step – so for the parents that are, you know, wanting to know what would you – what’s the first step? What do we do to help out, you know, kids with the bedwetting stuff?
It’s super important to communicate with children, even very young children, as to what’s going on. Validate them where they are. How hard this must be for them. The difficulty that they’re having. Reduce their stress about it. Take the blame off of them, really allow for them to have a place to talk about how they’re feeling about it. What they feel like might be helpful for them – talking, you know, trying to get them to express how they’re experiencing going to the bathroom so that you can really reduce the stigma around the issue for children.
Nice that makes a lot of sense – just to try to get to the underlying cause and finding out and sometimes we don’t think about that with young kids but it really is helpful to do that isn’t it?
It is, and children really understand a vast amount even before their verbal, and one of the things I often find with a lot of issues that parents have with their children is that they forget to say guess what this is the problem that we need to work together to solve – instead of getting frustrated and trying to solve the problem outside of the child knowing and you talking about this issue and the things that you’re going to do to help them and the things that they can do to help themselves.
I love that yeah it’s it’s such a huge thing and it really helped us as far as even like you know potty training with Lucy you know talking to her even though she wasn’t this late she is pretty verbal for her age but I mean even though it’s uh you know she didn’t necessarily you don’t necessrily think that they know what’s going on when you talk to him it’s pretty amazing what they do. So yeah let’s get into some of the natural remedies that you know of and I listed a few here but definitely get into other stuff that you use or you recommend to parents that you help?
Yeah so depending on what’s going on you know one of the things we definitely look at is the diet and what children are eating. We tend to feed children very high carbohydrate diets which can actually trigger going to the bathroom and toileting issues. You know, too much sugar, too much caffeine, you know, sodas and all of those kinds of things can really impact the entire body. But especially, you know,if you have a child who is bed wetting, we want to look at making sure that their diet is nice and healthy and taking out a lot of the, you know, things that we all know are not great things, right? Doing allergy testing can be very helpful to see if there’s a specific nutrient or food that’s causing a problem or an issue. And there’s different ways that you can do allergy testing to kind of see what’s going on.
And I was going to just kind of like you know have you noticed that with – because there’s so much with food allergies right now with kids and the different things like you know the artificial dyes, the artificial sweeteners all the processed foods but then you get into things like you know the dairy, the wheat, gluten as we all know even sometimes like soy and nuts and things like that – do those if you noticed those play a role in a possible role with the bedwetting?
I have – in a few different cases that people that I’ve worked with it’s sort of in those children went hand in hand is that there were some dietary issues their body was just having hard time processing food and you know releasing the bowel and the bladder is sort of that last process of processing food. And when the body is inundated with too many things that it can’t handle, oftentimes it will cause either, you know, an excess amount of going to the bathroom or not enough going to the bathroom and so both can cause and result in bed wetting.
Yeah that’s been my experience to yeah definitely the body sometimes want to get that stuff out so you don’t you’ll see it that way as well. And now I now obviously with chiropractic here that’s where you know we can step in here with our clinic and we know that what I’ve seen in the interesting thing is I had a young boy who came in who was having these issues and it wasn’t all the time but there were definitely times and you know obviously when we look back at some of the underlying causes the stress like with your son and in the situation on vacation – same thing happened you know and there during times of high stress he would wet the bed. And so we we went we went through and we checked him out and found out that there was some interference in the nerves that were in the lower back that go down to the bladder so, we did some pretty you know minor adjustments there you know that we can help out to reconnect those nerves and even during those high stress times after that, he didn’t have the issue of wetting the bed and let me tell you for him that was a huge thing because, as you said you know you get that stigma going and even things like you know sleepovers or you know, times where you’re you know traveling in the car and like fall asleep or things things that you know can gonna be you know stressful and scary because you’re not sure if you’re going to wet the bed for him you know when he knew he wasn’t going to do that it really made a huge difference. The other thing too is that you know when the body definitely when it’s in alignment not only you know are things going to function properly but those hormone levels can normalize and if it is a hormonal thing that definitely helps out with the bed wetting and that’s another thing that we we see quite a bit with the chiropractic care and obviously the benefit of that as compared to medications is guess what no no side effects. So that’s the that’s the really cool thing.
Chiropractic care is such an amazing um tool and a therapy that’s available and out there I think a lot of people forget that using it with children it can be so beneficial I run into people all the time who you know they go to the chiropractor themselves but they don’t think that children need it. And it’s like you were saying they’re out on the playground they’re falling over, their bodies are growing there knocking their heads they’re falling down and all of those things can throw their body – just tweak it and it can be out of whack and it can have huge impact on their hormone levels and the way that the the growth of their body and then these other deeper things of you know controlling bladder and bowel, appetite all that kind of stuff.
Yeah it is amazing when you talk about that because we have people come in here all the time and they see me adjusting kids and they’re like why are you adjusting them, they don’t have back pain do they? And it’s there it’s kind of funny because it’s no it’s not necessarily about back pain it’s about that growth it’s about the development it’s about hitting those genetic windows that making sure that they develop it absolutely properly so they can do everything that they need to do to grow up to be you know at maximum potential. So yeah I appreciate you saying that because it is really true that people just don’t even think about their kids and chiropractic and you know obviously I’m pretty blessed that I can adjust my girls and it’s just amazing to see how they grow up and you know the kids that we see in here how amazing it is when they’re they’re growing at full potential so. Is there any other natural remedies that you can think of that we might want like people won’t want to check into?
You know I’ve been thinking about that and really the, the other, the big thing is looking at how to reduce psychological and hormonal issues and those almost all come back to the same thing of diet. The other thing that really can make a big difference that I notice – activity level. So we all know that we need to get up and move and that we are more sedentary society than we’ve ever been before, but children especially need to be active and moving and the more that we move the more that the blood can flow properly to all of our organs and to run and it is definitely – there seems to be a little bit of a correlation between children who are having bed wetting issues and children who are not getting enough exercise.
Awesome yeah I agree a hundred percent with you that activity is such a huge thing, you know we just big kids need to be active and getting out there and playing and not you know sitting around watching TV all the time and doing things like that so that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well you know great amazing stuff that I really appreciate of your insights because like I say I mean you’ve done amazing things for us and I know that you’ve done amazing things and educating other people with the body train stuff – do you have any stuff coming up that you want to talk about?
So my next potty training class is in August and I’m just double-checking on the date there.
But if they want to find out more information about the family room how do they find that out?
Ueah so you can visit the family room website which is www.thefamilyroomdenver.com and go to our schedules page you can also visit my personal website and find all the information there um so we’ve got my next potty training class I’m teaching is not on my schedule. I think it’s the 12th or the 19th of August.
Awesome so they can just go to the website and find out that information. Well hey I really really appreciate all the the information that you gave us and and I’m super excited and I hope that we can talk to you down the road again if you notice as far as some of the other stuff, maybe we’ll try to get into something about potty training as well because you’re a master at that let me tell you is it’s it’s very amazing. And just to let you guys know these are some of the events that we are doing upcoming events that we have coming up – we’re going to be doing next month a backpack seminar for kids obviously heading back to school and then the following month we’re actually going to be talking about delivered a pregnancy and home birth workshop which natural pregnancy and home birth som if you guys have any interest in that the website is there and the other thing too is if you guys are having issues with not only bedwetting, potty training things like that- give us a call here and we can get you checked out and get your child checked out to make sure there isn’t any neurological issues and if that’s the case we can also get you to you know the resources like Patience and make sure that you we can get this taken care so your kid doesn’t have that that shame or stigma of having to wet the bed and all the stress along with that so once again Patience thank you very very much I appreciate all of your help and and I know that you helped a lot of people out.
Well thank you so much for having me it’s been such a pleasure I look forward to doing it again.
Yes awesome everybody have a great day and if you have any questions once again you can either go to Patience’s website or our website and we will definitely help you out as much as we can have a great day.
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