Stopping My Son’s Bedwetting: One Dad’s Fight Against Dick Fiddler

One thing that fatherhood teaches you is to be a scientist. Time and time again you will be faced with a problem, and using your intellect, logic, and luck you need to figure out a solution. Some problems are simple like realizing it is the too-tall sippy cup that is hitting the propeller thing in your dishwasher and making all that racket every night. But other problems will cause you such frustration in figuring out a solution that it could consume you.

Such a problem consumed me: why my older son continued to wet his bed every night. Here is my and his story on how together, with some help we defeated the evil Dick Fiddler.

My 2 year old son started wetting his bed ever since he moved to a big kid bed. Every morning, my wife or I would go into his room to find him soaked in his own urine. And every morning his piss-soaked pajamas would wake him and inevitably my wife and I up.

Every morning, we would go into his room and find him crying and uncomfortable. We would then strip off his pajamas, his diaper, the bedsheets, the blankets, and sometimes his prized stuff animals. We had a string of 9 wetted beds in a row one time. If anyone has ever changed bedsheets at 3 in the morning off of a bed with a bedrail attached to it, you know the pain this must have caused.

Needless to say, we were perplexed. So we started to test out various hypotheses. This is where the scientist dad factor comes in. At first, we thought he was drinking water and milk too close to bedtime. So the cutoff point to drink was instituted an hour before bedtime. The water works continued.

Then we thought that maybe it was the way we tucked his firehose in his diaper that was causing the trouble. We had noticed that when we changed his diaper after the  bedwetting that he was pointing upwards instead of downward to the super-absorbant part of the diaper. So we made conscious effort to pin that boy down when we strapped on the diaper. Every morning, he would be pointing up again and the piss parade went on.

Then we thought maybe his diaper just wasn’t absorbent enough, so we bought a pair of Goodnites and prayed for the best. Still, every night he played a visit with the Count of Monte Pissto.

Just as we had given up all hope, a strange thing occurred. A eureka moment if you will. Our boy is special but in no way is he special enough to pack in liquid like a camel, pop an erection to elude a tightly strapped on diaper, and aim around the super spongey $1.50/pair Good Nite. Maybe he was sabotaging himself.

Maybe he was a Dick Fiddler in disguise. He is a guy after all. And I don’t care what other people say, holding onto your own package in the middle of the night is a guy thing to do, regardless of age.

It would certainly explain why he was standing at attention every morning. It would also explain why his leaking occurred above the waist strap, not out the crotch openings.

So we did one final test. One last ditch effort to stop the pee: we put on a onesie. The onesie, we reasoned, would be snapped together over the diaper making it impossible for him to reach in to do his fiddling without unstrapping the onesie. 3 months later we have not had one leak.

Now let me be clear, the problem was not that my so fiddles with his penis every night. It is that he did it without being potty trained.  When he is old enough to handle his own weapon, we will let him play with it again to his heart’s content. Until then, my boy will have to reserve his fiddling time for the bathtub.