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A Guy's Guide to Bedwetting
Understanding Bedwetting from a Boy's Perspective
By Kelly Burgess
Your son's favorite pastime may be hunting snakes or tackling the players on an opposing football team, but he's still a little boy. The idea that male equals macho and that boys are supposed to be tough may lead parents to believe that bedwetting is somehow more unusual or shameful for their son than their daughter. In reality, boys are more apt to wet the bed longer than girls, and they need as much love and support as their female peers.
Dr. Marlene Huff, an associate professor in the College of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics at the University of Kentucky, says boys can feel deeply ashamed of their bedwetting because of our society's expectations for them to be "little men."
"We hear a lot about girls being sexualized and forced to grow up too soon, but the fact is that this pressure is felt by boys as well, perhaps even more strongly because of the masculine element," Dr. Huff says. "We begin calling boys 'young men' when they're as young as 6 or 8 years old. They aren't young men; they're still little boys."
To illustrate how ludicrous it is to call a boy as young as 6 a "young man," Dr. Huff point out that at age 6, only about 85 percent of all children are completely beyond the possibility that bedwetting might occur. At about age 10, approximately 5 percent of all children still wet the bed. And, of that number, boys are almost twice as likely to wet the bed than girls.
The big problem with perceiving little boys as "big" is that they may not get the little boy attention that they need from their parents, the cuddling and lap sitting that, perhaps, is still available to a girl of the same age, but that a boy needs just as much. Dr. Huff also says boys tend to be less open about their emotions than girls, so they really need parents to be sensitive to their need to communicate.