What do you call something that’s not an accident?
**This was originally published July 2019 – lost in November 2022 – revived and updated March 2024. My daughter was 4 1/2 when this was first written and, now that’s she 8, I have many, many more experiences to inform this.**
If you and I were to sit down and talk about pee-pee, I could single-handedly carry conversation for at least the first hour, probably much longer. I’ve gathered over sixty anecdotes and lessons over the past few months – sometimes as many as four a day. Not to brag, but I got a lot of liquid gold in my life.
But, this is not a discussion about pee – it’s about everything surrounding it.
Roughly a month and a half ago, my four-year-old daughter started having small ‘accidents’. Their infrequency at the beginning made each incident seem disconnected, a bunch of separate snowflakes, instead of what they were. So, at the time, every episode ended quickly and cleanly with me saying some kind of de-emphasized stock parent statement like ‘let’s listen to our bodies more next time’ or ‘no big deal, let’s just try squeezing all our pee out each time’.
While I might not have noticed the growing frequency or at least didn’t worry about it, Augustine did. And, one day the building snowball landed. Augustine broke down in tears, crying ‘I’m not a bad girl’.
Let’s be honest – crying seems so much worse if the person is naked, even half-naked. My heat broke, looking at my little girl, pants bunched on the floor – visibly darker towards the center – screaming out between tears. Of course Augustine wasn’t a bad girl, but standing here in our carpeted hallway was a leaky bladder a bad situation.
Bad – ugh – what a terrible spray-paint-y word.
Immediately I was taken back to when we had to cope with Augustine being poop-shamed in preschool. I thought we’d moved on, but here I was again at a potty-crossroads, where the intricacies of words had to be parsed out. Where I needed to attempt to explain that bad isn’t the right word and it doesn’t always mean bad-bad; that peeing your pants isn’t like hitting ‘bad’, it’s more like running late to an appointment ‘bad’ (which probably doesn’t make sense even to you – an adult).
Still, as the parent looking at the situation, this was bad. Or at least at this point, I had to start to think that there’s something bad – some problem – here. Why was this continuing to happen? I mean, obviously Augustine wasn’t trying to pee her pants, so what was causing this?
For me, my decades of watching SVU kicked in and I had a series of chats with my daughter trying to discern if someone was bothering her ‘down there’. This wasn’t easy to figure out – more like decoding the practices of a foreign civilization. So much of preschool life is crazy-unusual from everyday adult life that making sense of the answers Augustine would tell me was more like best-guessing.
Of course there were people in the bathroom when we used the potty.
Of course people touched her to help wipe her butt.
I wish this had only been a single short talk that quickly calmed my fears, but instead it was a series of conversations spread out over days with me rephrasing questions over and over – hoping that each different set of words would throw new light on the scene, like a photographer spinning open the aperture to illuminate the shadows. Eventually, I had tried enough combinations of questions that I was satisfied understanding she wasn’t being ‘bothered’.
Then, nearly the same day as I set aside my ‘Benson/Stabler’ detective routine, my wife got an email about bladder issues in 3 year olds. Apparently, sudden bouts of daytime/nighttime urination are very common.
Using the email as a jumping off point , I did a bit of digging. Of course, as with any Google health search, the first ten explanations were all rare unexplained diseases, cancer, and imminent death.
Rephrasing my question a few times (which I had recently gotten really good at doing), I was able to find many much more helpful articles which, when combined, attributed these sudden bouts of uncontrolled urination to a mixture of kids holding in their pee/poop too much, anxiety, and even just their body outgrowing their ability to control it.
From all of this, the tidbits and data points added up to one seemingly, ultimately important fact – sudden pee problems are normal for the majority of kids.
Sure, Augustine might be anxious, might need to be taught to potty more frequently, but this is ultimately just an average phase of learning how to-be-a-person in today’s world.
Or, more personally, I’m not giving my kid any more anxiety than most people are and she not responding to situations in some freaky/inexplicable way.
Right now, we’re still working on ending the accidents, which is proving to be much more difficult than simply eliminating Augustine’s worry over peeing herself.
I don’t want to over-compliment my wife and I, but we must have actually done an amazing job eliminating Augustine’s pee-pants-shame. We’ve gotten to a point where peeing herself during the day doesn’t bother her at all. So much so, that we have to stop her and tell her that she has wet her pants and we need to change. To which, she most often replies ‘but it’s just a little pee’.
Our biggest if not only weapon has become forcing her to try and use the bathroom before we leave any place that has a bathroom. However, with so many changes coming from and impacting her growing body, I’m not concerned with stomping out these accidents like a spreading fire. There’s a part of all this that’s normal, even if it’s inconvenient.
Update 2024
We did eventually end the preschool cases of pee-pee-pants, but a few months into covid she started having accidents at night.
So, we had roughly a year without handling pee, and I’m going to go ahead and say that – across the board – any problems that occur at night are exponentially more troubling/difficult than something happening at say 3-in-the-afternoon.
After a week or so of trying to work through the bed-wetting accidents with not seeming change and less-and-less sleep (with more and more laundry). We implemented pull-ups…careful to not call them diapers.
That was roughly 3 years ago, and we haven’t found a solution. But, we have found tons and tons of other parents whose kids also wet the bed regularly at night.
I didn’t know this was a thing, but it’s a thing.
We haven’t spoken to all our friends about this so I don’t have a percentage, but, even undercounting, there’s a sizable chunk of Augustine’s peers that regularly/nightly wet their bed. The oldest we’ve talked to that continues to have this situation is 9. So we have some runway ahead of us before she’s the oldest kid who still needs diapers pull-ups.
I was worried about this for a long time, even as it became normalized, but – after talking to several doctors – Augustine seems to be ‘ok’. The tidbit that sorta settled the affair was (paraphrased) if a kid isn’t waking up while they’re peeing at night, then they are sleeping very deeply and/or not getting the signal to pee…yet.
So, essentially the sum total of human knowledge of kid-bed-wetting is…give the kid’s body time to learn to wake-up and go pee.
Like so many things, talking about it (which is the sort of non-organic conversation topic that really needs to be shoved into a chat) let us know that we aren’t alone, and honestly that’s the first step to finding peace and getting comfortable with raising-kids issue.
So, we’re giving Augustine time…and princess adorned pull-ups.
Now, if we could just convince Atlas to not rip-off his diaper and say pee-pee while letting it fly across the floor. Unfortunately, that also seems to be normal.