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Home › Articles › Bedwetting › A Girl's Guide to Bedwetting

A Girl's Guide to Bedwetting

Understanding Bedwetting from a Girl's Perspective

By Kelly Burgess

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Parents know that girls and boys are different in lots of ways. What many parents don't realize is that bedwetting can be more emotionally upsetting for a girl at an earlier age than it is for a boy.

Dr. Patrick C. Friman, a clinical psychologist and director of Girls' and Boys' Town Outpatient Behavioral Pediatrics and Family Services in Boys Town, Neb., says that Dr. F.C. Verhulst, a noted psychiatrist and researcher, made the case 10 years ago to change the diagnostic criteria of bedwetting treatment to age 5 for girls and age 8 for boys because he thought the epidemiology was so different. In other words, it's more developmentally out of line for a girl to wet the bed at age 5 than it is for a boy.

"Girls mature emotionally more quickly and are ultimately more sensitive to the social implications of bedwetting than their male peers," Dr. Friman says. "Because of that, I do think there's a difference in how bedwetting impacts girls and the depth of the feeling that they have about it. For that reason I will take bedwetting girls into treatment when they're 5 or 6 whereas I'll wait until 7 or 8 for boys because it takes them that long to care."

Enuresis and Emotions

Hope*, from Washington, D.C., says her daughter suffered through bedwetting until she was about 9, and she was extremely upset by it at a very young age, to the point that Hope worried her daughter would carry the psychological scars for life.

"One day we took her do the doctor when she was still fairly young – 5 or 6 – and he just said she'd grow out of it," Hope says. "It was terrible. She was sad and we were sad for her. As first-time parents you don't really know what's right or wrong and we listened to him, but in hindsight I wish I hadn't because she was very conscious of it and it did impact her. Even the few things he did suggest seemed to just make her feel humiliated, like she was doing this on purpose."


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