Keeping beds dry during potty training is every parent’s challenge. You do not want to have to change bedding in the middle of the night because your little angel wet the bed. Below, I have listed some ideas to help keep beds dry during this phase of life, or at least, ensuring the least amount of maintenance.

The first thing you need to remember when you want to keep the bed dry during potty training is that you can actually let the kid wear a diaper at night and still take them to potty. This is totally doable and many parents go this route. But sometimes, if you have a heavy wetter, the beds can get wet, even with diapers on. At that point, it’s a mess of wet sheets, stinky kids and wet mattresses and is no fun. Especially when it’s in the middle of the night.

The first thing I would do is get a vinyl mattress protector. This is a plastic like sheet that goes over the mattress. This can be used right up to adulthood actually and every mattress should have one. Even mom and dad’s bed, just in case your little angel decides to join you in the bed and have an accident.

After that, you can put a mattress protector on the bed. This will at least keep mattresses dry during potty training, even if the sheets get wet. But there are ways to keep the sheets dry too. Keep reading to find out how.

After putting on the sheet (over the vinyl mattress cover and the other mattress cover), you can get something called an incontinence pad, or a waterproof underpad. This helps the sheets and bed to stay dry. If there is an accident, the only thing that needs to be removed from the bed is the underpad. The rest of the bed would have stayed dry, and potty training can continue.

There are other ways to keep the bed dry during potty training, but these are the cheapest methods. One can also invest in a bed wetting alarm which wakes your child up in time to go to the washroom. All these things will help to keep beds dry during the potty training season.

Night time potty training can be quite difficult to achieve. Especially when you are struggling with a child that has incontinence. This issue can be hard to deal with and take many many months to sort out. This can also deprive you of sleep and sanity.

The first part of tackling the night time potty training involves a proper assessment of your child. Does your child have wet underwear during the day? If so, what is the cause? When your child reaches 7 or older and the underwear is still wet during the day, there may be a medical problem that needs to get checked out by a doctor. But if that’s been cleared up and there are no medical issues, you need to come up with some fantastic night time potty training ideas to get this sorted out.

I do want to say that there are many older kids who still go to bed with diapers at night. Some have genetic or medical issues, other have psychological issues and others just simply have a brain bladder problem where the brain is not communicating properly with the bladder, or the child could be sleeping so deeply that he or she does not wake up on time to potty.

If you are ready to tackle the problem of night time potty training and need some ideas, start here.

Firstly, you need to set your child up for success. Sit the child down and explain that you are going to try and keep your diaper dry during the night. To do this, it will cause some changes such as limiting liquids before bed time. The child needs to get used to the idea to successfully potty, there will have to be less liquids at night. So after dinner, have a little bit of water and leave it there.

The second thing you may want to do is make sure that your child uses the potty after dinner and again just before bed. This is important for successful potty training at night. There cannot be a full bladder before bed time, or bed wetting will occur and the potty training will not work.

The next thing to remember is to keep a light on in the house during the night. Kids do not like to get up during the night to go potty, regardless of whether you are busy with night time potty training or not. They don’t like the dark. Make it pleasant for them.

Something we like to do is have a large potty in each room, right next to the bed so that there is no running to the washroom during the night time potty training. The kid can just get out of bed, do the business can and get back into bed.

Before you go to bed, help the kid to get up and pee again before going back to sleep. This will help train the child’s mind to get up to make pee during the night.

Another important thing about night time potty training and an idea is to have bed-wetting blankets on the bed. This eliminates the need to change sheets in the middle of the night. Incontinence pads can be bought to put on top of the sheets. Stinky sheets are not pleasant, nor are wet sheets. The pads can just be taken off, leaving dry sheets underneath.

You need to also factor into the night time potty training the fact that you will have to probably not sleep for a couple of weeks as you train your child to night time potty.

Bed-wetting alarms have been known to work and is another option to look into. A bed wetting alarm helps with potty training at night in that it wakes the child up before the bed wetting actually occurs. New technology that detects body rhythm.

At the end of the day, successful night time potty training will only work when your child is ready to train and you make the necessary effort to train the child.