Technique 7 (Bed wetting prevention)

[speedx5xracer]

Situation Known bed wetting camper/s
Effectiveness from experiences (results vary too much for rating)

So your reading the camper info cards and you realize that one of your campers or more than one have a problem with their bladder at night. If you are anything like me you dread the idea of changing urine soaked linen. So how do you prevent that. Once you and your other bunk staff have been made aware of the problem there are two things that you can do.
1. at around 12:30am (0030) (most campers wet the bed around 1 or 2 am from my experience) wake the child and walk them to the bath room. Don’t let them back in bed till they have peed. Don’t worry they aren’t really awake they probably will be in a zombie like state.
2. if the parents are unaware tell your unit supervisor they might talk to the parents about a medical solution. ( I had one camper with that med it worked great except the side effect is snoring)

[code3cadet]

ya that works some time. some time the kids will not get up and they still do it. ya are not to shack a kids at all. or touch them in there beds. I have the camp mom do eveything when the kid dose this.

[speedx5xracer]

O were allowed as long as we clear it with the division head. You dont shake the kids you tap them and prop them up they will wake up on their own.

[camper]

we don't do a whole lot beforehand to prevent bedwetting...if we know a kid is a bedwetter we're supposed to do everything normal in the morning, and then on the way up to the mess hall the counselors rotate days checking the bed. if we need to, we change the sheets and try to leave the bed unmade or however it was before the kids left for breakfast, so the other kids don't suspect anything. i know its gross to clean it up, but the counselor who is in the bunk for the night would be in charge of waking the kid up, it's just really difficult the way our camp is set up.

[CAMPFRIEND]

You are right on. I had 7 year olds for a summer. I did this every night. I had 12 campers and 10 were bed wetters! I loved being a counselor but there are days that I don't miss it.

[rockinsmiles]

Wow 10 is a lot! i never had a "bed wetter"...basically cuz i was a counselor for the older campers besides for my first week. that first week i did have a camper come and tell me she had wet her bed but when we checked we decided she must have dreamed that. she was only sweaty. that made me much happier :)

[Lilly]

If I am aware of this I wll check with the camper first thing in the morning and if she has wet the bed I will pretend to be goofing around with her a "spill" my water on the bed. This helps keep the other kids from knowing about it and cut down on the teasing. I bag it up and take it with us to drop in the machine on our way to breakfast.

[camper]

lilly...i think that technique is a good one for one time...but what happens if the camper wets the bed more than once and you try to use it again? the kids never catch on?

[Trees]

I don't really get the big deal about changing wet beds, but I guess we all have different "ick" buttons. This is one time when I wish we used bed linens instead of sleeping bags--sleeping bags are a PAIN to wash.

Most kids (girls, anyway, I don't know about boys) have been really understanding if they find out another kid wet the bed. They'd be less so in the older groups, I think. Our kids spend almost no time in their tents, so doesn't matter much, but generally we swap the wet bag for one from the infirmary and no one knows the difference.

For kids who are frequent bed-wetters, I love it when they bring Pull-Ups.

[CAMPFRIEND]

Trees- I think that boys are a lot different. Older boys will make fun of it of they get the chance. For the younger kids they I don't think care. I think the best thing that you can do is talk to all of you campers one-on-one the first day of camp and ask them if there is anything that you need to know. Most campers will tell you if they are a bed wetter or not.

I think that no matter what age you are with you still need to do bed checks. I don't think that there is anything worse than a bed that smells in the hot summer heat!

[Lilly]

camper, we have other "tricks" that we use incase it happens more than once. Another one that we use is taking all the sleeping bags out of the cabin during breakfast, wash the ones that need to be washed, and then we hang them out in the trees around the unit as if someone was pulling a prank on our cabin.

[camper]

thats funny, but it sounds like all of this stuff takes a lot of work!! haha. we wouldn't have time to do stuff like that most days.

[audur]

I've had kids of pretty much all ages - 5 to 15, and I've never had a bed wetter. Which is amazing, I would've thought I'd had at least a couple! When I had the very youngest campers, though, they kept waking eachother up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night (I always woke up as they walked by the counselor cabin, whispering...), so that might've helped.

I did have 14-year-old think she wet her bed this summer, though... I was on a biking trip, and one morning my co-counselor and I heard shouting from one of the camper tents, and then one of our campers climbed out, with a horrified look on her face, saying "Oh my god, my sleeping bag is all wet! But I've never wet the bed before!!" and I was like too bad you chose the middle of a biking trip to start - cause there was no way we could've washed that sleeping bag any time soon... fortunately, we figured out that it had only been water that had spilled from her water bottle, since it didn't smell like urine :p her reaction was soooo funny though, because she didn't care at all that the other three girls heard her (granted, this was after we'd spent every waking minute together for over a week, and a good portion of that was while camping in relatively primitive areas).

[who_stole_my_loofa]

Another thing we do to keep people from wetting the bed is have a cut off time for drinking liquids. At home a lot of them do this so it's not a big deal. This means no milk call usually- but they can still have cookies! I also agree about waking them up around midnight/when you get back from your night out.

Loofa

[camper]

yeah i've never worked w/younger kids before (even though there's the possibility of that changing...lol) but i think that when a parent writes on the info sheet about the camper that she's a bed wetter, my mom or our director calls the family and asks what they usually do to prevent it and how to talk to the camper if it happens. i have a feeling that different things work for different kids. loofa i definitely think the liquid cutoff thing is a GREAT idea...that would mean no milk call for our kids either but yeah cookies lol, the only bad thing would be that if they eat cookies they'll probably want water. oh well, i guess you have to give them that choice!

[CAMPFRIEND]

It's great when the parents tell you first. Not the camper in the morning or two days later. Oh the smell!

[collissimon]

We usually have a bedwetter at least once a session (2 a summer) because the medication they're on usually makes them really heavy sleepers, so it turns off the alarm bells that sound when you need to pee.

Wet beds really don't faze me, a counsellor stays behind while the rest go off to breakfast, and takes it down to the laundry, and collects clean bedding. They change it, or they kinda half do it, so they've still got to make their beds during clean up.

There are far worse things to deal with than pee! I think the main thing is to not make it an issue, so the other kids don't make fun, or the kid doesn't feel excluded.

I had a really surprising situation last year, where a kid was wearing night pants, kinda like a pull-up thing. He would go in secret to the bathroom, and change into them and the kids didn't know anything about it... until they found the packet underneath my bed. One kid started to make fun, but all the others turned on him to protect the first! They were all really mature about it, and it wasn't an issue for the whole four weeks: it was really nice :)

[who_stole_my_loofa]

I love that your campers were mature enough to stick up for that kid- I only hope that if this were to happen to my kids they would do the same.

[CAMPFRIEND]

THat says a lot for your campers as well as you as a counselor. You must do a great job with the kids for them to stick up for one camper. It's the little things that you do as a counselor that can make a problem go away!

[collissimon]

Thanks! :o (is that a blushing smiley, cos I am!)

:cheers:

[happy_camper]

In the packet our parents receive when the register their child for camp, there is a section about bed wetting. They are asked to send "Good Nights" (like Pull-Ups for bed-wetters) to the infirmary. When the bedtime meds go in to take their medicine, the bed wetter will go in with them and put on the good night in private in the infirmary. The parents are also asked to send extra bedding (to keep in the infirmary in case of an accident). The letter also tells the parent what to tell the child to do in case of an accident (tell the counselor, who will change the linens after the group leaves for breakfast). If something like this happens, try to keep it private. Obviously, the kid will tell you in private, but as long as you wash the linens after the group leaves and no one ever finds out, you should have a good summer.

:)

[speedx5xracer]

since writing this one my camp has taken my advice and put a similar letter in our camper packets that families receive when they register their child for the summer. Happy Camper that is similar to what we do now except using the infirmary. because of our numbers it isn't feasable to let healthy campers in the infirmary all the time so what we have been doing is when the kids get ready for bed make up some excuse why this one kid needs to be in the bathroom alone to change. and with 7-9 year olds they typically dont question why every one staff included is banned from the bath room for a few minutes at night.

[prettysocks]

I don't really get the big deal about changing wet beds, but I guess we all have different "ick" buttons.

Thank you for saying that!! I was reading through this and thinking "what a bunch of wimps!". In our cabin of 8 campers, we typically change about 3 or 4 beds in the morning, and some of those campers wear attends (adult diapers) anyways!

For those who are grossed out by touching wet sheets, do you use gloves? If you don't, you should ask to be provided with a box, or go out and by your own box and bring it to camp. Think of it as training for being a parent potentially some time down the line (if not, possibly and aunt or uncle who babysits?).

[speedx5xracer]

its not about changing the beds its the other kids reactions to a kid wetting their bed

[prettysocks]

.. it doesn't have to be a huge production. anyways.

[speedx5xracer]

no but secrecy is the best for kids

[Camp_cullen_freak_2004]

we have a code word that means "i wet the bed", and they (the bed wetter) says it around the counselor, (each bed wetter thats known hs a different code)and the counselor takes care of it