Bedwetting and Summer Camp

Susan K. Schulman, MD, author of "Understanding Your Child's Health", discusses the impact of bedwetting on children attending camp.

Bedwetting and Summer Camp Male: Kids that bedwet just go on to overnight camp, come in question. How would you approach that problem? Susan Schulman: If they don’t want to work pull ups in the bottom or some of them don’t mind. If they don’t want to wear some kind of protected diaper at night, they can be given medication that will slow down the amount of urine that they’d produce during the night. And that is the easiest one to use and one of the safest is DDAVP. And that’s giving them two-milligram tablets. It can be given anywhere from one to four tablets. And I strongly suggest to the parents that they try one tablet and wait a few nights and see if it’s helping the problem then add a tablet and don’t send them off to camp experimenting. Let them know how much they need to control their bedwetting. If they’re just wetting once every ten or twelve days, I don’t give them anything. I tell them which days to watch out for. The nights that they stay up the latest and they're still drinking, and the nights that they're the tired-est from the day, the most exhausted days and the nights that they wet. So on those nights, maybe you should have a pull ups somewhere in their trunk that they could put it on if they think it’s going to be a bad night. If the medications do help in some kids and most kids, but I don’t like to keep them on for 20 years. I use it for one who need it.