Treatment with Urine Alarm System

Related Content

• Bedwetting: How to Help Your Child
• Bedwetting: How to Help Your Child

By Sara Dimerman

If your child is over the age of six and still wetting his or her bed at night, you might be concerned. Before considering any treatment options, it is wise to have your doctor or pediatrician assess your child to make sure that there is no physical cause. Once this concern has been eliminated, you may want to explore different treatment options.

One of the oldest and most widely used treatments for enuresis is the Urine Alarm (UA). This comes in several different styles. There are wearable alarms which are designed so that the child wears the moisture sensor in or on his underwear. This type of sensor will detect moisture almost immediately. Another type is the wireless alarm which is one in which the sensor and the alarm communicate by means other than a wire. The transmitter, which senses the moisture, is directly attached to the child's underwear. The signal is transmitted wirelessly to a unit that is across the child's room. The third type is the pad-type alarm which does not attach to the child. The child sleeps on top of the cloth pad. However, this alarm requires a larger amount of urine before the sensor can detect moisture. In most cases, the alarm wakes the child before he or she has fully urinated. Therefore, the child is woken with his or her bladder still quite full. Over time, the idea is that the child begins to associate the feeling of a full bladder with the sounding of the bell and waking up.

The Urine Alarm system is more effective when accompanied by concurrent Cleanliness Training. This means that after the child has gotten up to finish urinating on the toilet, that he or she would also be required to change any wet clothing, strip the bed, remake the bed and reset the bell and pad equipment. The reason for getting your child to take care of the above mentioned is so that he or she assumes some responsibility for the bedwetting. Some Psychologists have determined that in some cases, a child's bedwetting behaviour is subtly reinforced when a parent strips, cleans and remakes the bed while having a pleasant interaction with his or her child. It is recommended that instead, parents remain more neutral during the process of directing or assisting a child rather than being pleasant. It is also recommended that parents are not punitive during the process as in the vast majority of cases, bedwetting is involuntary and children feel bad enough about their behaviour already.

Research has shown that this method is especially effective at reducing the number of times a child bedwets when it is first used, but that over time, there is risk of prolapse. Some experts recommend that if the alarm is set to sound in only about 7 of 10 times that a child bedwets, that the risk of relapse may be lessened. This is according to the principle that a change in behaviour may be more permanently achieved when the behaviour is not reinforced 100% of the time but rather on a variable basis.

There are many other variables that affect the success of using this method of treatment. These include whether or not the child has one or more wetting episodes at night (more effective with the former), whether the child wets both at night and during the day or just when in bed (more effective when just at night). It is also said to be less effective if the child is also dealing with problems within the family or has a fear of the equipment, for example.