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Home › Articles › Bedwetting › Genetics and Bedwetting

Genetics and Bedwetting

When Kids Follow in Your Footsteps

By Deborah Geary

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It's a peculiar joy of parents when our children inherit our winning smiles, curly hair or outgoing personalities. We like to know that our kids take after us, clear evidence that we really have passed along our genes to the next generation. However, sometimes we pass along things we wish we hadn't. Parents who suffered through a childhood of bedwetting often wish they could spare their children the discomfort of following in these particular footsteps.

It's in the Genes

Dr. Carolyn Thiedke, professor of family medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, says genetics play a key role in bedwetting. "There are probably several causes of bedwetting, but it is clear that having parents who wet the bed makes it more likely that a child will wet the bed," she says. "Children who have one parent who wet the bed have a 43 percent chance of wetting the bed, and if both parents wet the bed, the chance climbs to 77 percent."

Parents who have a personal history of bedwetting often find themselves parenting at least one child who wets the bed. Tamara Nichols, of Dallas, Texas, wet her bed daily until she was about 8 years old. Then it tapered off and stopped over the next four years. She now sees her daughters following a very familiar pattern. "Kim is 12," says Nichols. "She wet nightly till age 6 and about two times a week until age 10 and just stopped at 10. Tracy is only 8 now and she wets every night, just about."

However, passing on bedwetting genes to your children is not a simple process – or all bad. Researchers at UCLA have discovered that parents who pass on bedwetting to their kids are also often passing on intelligence. Their study of children with a family history of bedwetting found that children who had a lower than normal impulse to wake up when needing to urinate (often resulting in bedwetting), also had higher than normal IQ scores.


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