There are countless bed wetting stories but only one common truth among all bed wetters. Bed wetting is, to one degree or another, traumatic to any child under the best of circumstances.

I wet my bed until I was 9 years old and my parents handled it perfectly, they totally ignored it. My mother would change my sheets and life would go on. I tried to train my own body to do what it just wasn't capable of by doing the obvious things. I would go to the bathroom before bed and refrain from taking in liquids for a while before bed as well. It didn't matter. There was simply nothing that I could do to prevent waking up in a pool of cold urine.

I don't know if I slept too hard or if my bladder was weak but I do remember waking up and thinking that I had to go to the restroom only to incorporate the information into a dream. I would dream that I had gone to the restroom. And, as I dreamt that I was voiding in the toilet, I was actually voiding in my bed.

Christmas mornings are not seared into my memory as strongly as the nights that I wet my bed as a child. I can easily recall the feeling of warm urine turning cold enough to wake me up. I would have to get out of my bed, change my pajamas and lie in the middle of a big round rug with tassels all around it. I would lie there for the longest time, feeling badly and trying to fall back asleep. To make my mind stop thinking about the bed wetting, I would count the tassels on the huge rug, then the individual yarns in each tassel and then I would multiply the numbers to find out how many yarns were in the rug. I spent a lot of nights on that rug counting pieces of yarn.

At 9 years old when you are trying everything that you can think of to stop the bed wetting, the only thing that would have been worse was if my parents pointed it out at all. I would hate to be a bed wetter today with alarms that wake a kid up rudely as he or she wets himself instead of the gentle awakening the kid would experience as the warm urine turned cold. As a child, I hoped that I wouldn't wet the bed at home and I prayed that it never happened while I was spending the night somewhere else. I cannot imagine being 8 years old and worrying that an alarm would tell the entire household that I had slept through another bladder emptying.

I wet the bed well after I was old enough to do everything in my power to make it stop…and I did, I absolutely did. But my efforts were for naught. I couldn't prevent the bed wetting no matter what I did. If I couldn't stop it at 9, there's no way that a younger child could possibly learn to control it.

As a parent, the only thing that you can do is protect the child's mattress and keep the bed linen clean. The decision whether or not to use diapers should be the child's. If an older child wants to wear a diaper, let him. If he doesn't want to wear it, don't push it. Find a quiet and private way to let the child know that diapers are an option. Tell them that you don't actually think that they need the diaper, but if they want it, you will discreetly provide it.