Is bedwetting hereditary? To get straight to the point, bedwetting is largely hereditary. In 2018, a large study was conducted in Denmark on the genetic study of 80,000 Danes. The conclusion is that if one of the parents has suffered from bedwetting in the past, there is an average chance of 44% that your child will also suffer from bedwetting.
When both parents have had to deal with bedwetting, this percentage increases to 77%, so we can conclude that bedwetting is hereditary. These are strong indicators that you could therefore work directly towards a good solution at an early stage with the correct information to start working with a solution in the potty training that will help to keep bedwetting as limited as possible .
Causes of bedwetting
It sometimes seems like children pee in bed to attract attention, but that is rarely the reason. Most children even find it very unpleasant that this happens to them, without being able to do anything about it. Parents sometimes think that children pee in bed to frustrate or annoy. However, this rarely happens in practice. Bedwetting is a subconscious process and too complicated of a way for a child to express displeasure or attract attention. Moreover, almost every child is ashamed of bedwetting. For example, a child who wants to attract attention or is angry is more likely to complain of stomach pain or refuses to eat.
There are some children, especially older children, who behave with indifference. It is often the case that children do not know what to do with this problem and avoid it for this reason. They then develop an evasive attitude as a solution to their problem under the motto “if I pretend it doesn’t exist, it won’t be there”. For parents, this evasive attitude to bedwetting is difficult to understand and these parents will try again and again to solve the problem alongside their child. If this fails, the child will experience an increasing sense of failure with every failed attempt, which strengthens his evasive posture.
Is bedwetting hereditary?
Recently, researchers have found out the exact location of the genes that cause bedwetting. One gene is found on chromosome 12 and the other on chromosome 13. Such discoveries can help in the continuous development of a better approach to bedwetting.
What do you do against bedwetting?
A child who wets the bed several times a night after pre-school age during sleep without intent is called a bedwetter (also called enuresis nocturna). Since bedwetting is hereditary, there is a reasonable chance that one of the parents did this in the past as well. The peeing process is completely normal: the child does a complete pee in bed. In the Netherlands the norm of urinating in bed twice a month for children of five and six years old and at least once a month for older children applies.
We speak of bedwetting (enuresis nocturna) when there is no physical disorder such as diabetes, urinary tract infections or epilepsy. We also make a distinction between children who have never been dry at night (primary bedwetting) and children who have been completely potty trained but who have started bedwetting again (secondary bedwetting). In more than half of the children bedwetting occurs in the family, which proves that bedwetting is hereditary.
Although bedwetting is hereditary, it can also be easily remedied. Always consult your general practitioner / pediatrician or community doctor to discuss in what way it is a bedwetting problem, or whether there may be a medical cause. When it is largely about the emotional and social factors, a bedwetting alarm is an excellent solution to remedy the bedwetting. This method is recommended by most doctors and has become increasingly accessible over the years. To be able to compare the bedwetting alarms that are available, we tested them all in the same way.