ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! Blog Post #13 – Chapter 8. Bedwetting and Other Frustrating Behaviors

Posted November 5, 2016

I hope you will enjoy today’s chapter excerpt from my new book due out it in December, (working title) ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! A Husband-Wife Date-Study for Successfully Raising Adopted Children in the Christian Home. This week I approved my publisher’s typesetting layout — it is gorgeous! Next, I will get to proof the cover design ideas. It is very exciting that after 5 years of planning and writing, it is all coming together. I will have Beta reader feedback, and hopefully several endorsements by November 15. It is a long process, but worth the wait.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. Galatians 5:22-23

I am not fond of housework, except for cooking, and even that has gotten old after three meals a day for nearly 30 years. I have a friend who loves to iron, and I absolutely do not relate to that! Thankfully my kids are old enough, and trained enough, to clean our house every Thursday night so I don’t have to. Laundry is my main task besides meal preparation, and it is absolute drudgery. I usually wash and dry three to four loads during the night since I wake up every two hours anyway. Thankfully, the laundry room is adjacent to my bedroom and bath. But, I hate it. I can’t tell you how glad I am not to be washing urine soaked sheets anymore! Bedwetting… it is best you accept right now that it will be part and parcel to adopting kids. And there will be bedding to wash over and over and over again!

There is no real solution to bedwetting, because there is no real scientific evidence of why it happens. Bedwetting can be a sign of sexual abuse, too deep of a sleep, a hormonal imbalance, precocious puberty (very early onset), defiance and rebellion, laziness, or simply the way a child’s body is created. There are no easy answers, and it is a very frustrating thing for parents who deal with it night after night.

Some things we found that did not work to stop bedwetting included: spanking, yelling, punitive consequences, comparing to other children, and interrogating the perpetrator—which all came down to assuming the child had control over the situation and could therefore change at will. Isn’t it nice that we did all that research for you so you can just skip all of it and save yourself a lot of precious time?

Solutions that did help, and allowed our loving relationship to continue until the incidents became few and far between (and then after many years, non-existent), included: not making a big deal out of it, having a sleeping bag available on the floor so our child could find an easy bed nearby to continue sleeping, having our child help strip the bed and assist with the laundry the next morning, having our child drink no fluids after dinner, helping our child get up during the night to use the toilet once or twice (more times than that didn’t help and we became sleep deprived which really didn’t help), talking with our child about the ‘swimsuit’ area being off-limits for anyone to touch except for toileting or parent/doctor physical examination, discussing with our doctor the possibility of a deeper problem (there were none), and accepting that it was a fact of life in our household for several—no, make that many—years.

sharimcminn

Shari Howard McMinn is an author, editor, farmer, writer, and most importantly Mom to 11 children. Widowed very unexpectedly on June 2, 2013, Shari continued the direction of her life built with her late husband, Cary, and launched her public speaking and writing business which he had often encouraged her to do. Drawing from her 'over the top' life, she writes non-fiction and presents PowerPoint talks on issues related to family life, including adoption, childhood nutrition, family economics, homeschooling, and proactive parenting. She is available for broadcast interviews and presentations in Colorado and surrounding states, as well as Florida and Georgia. A dynamic speaker, Shari engages the audience with her true-life storytelling and practical advice based on experience and biblical wisdom.