Understanding The Deep Sleeper

Parents often wonder how failure of arousal from sleep influences bedwetting. The answer is, if the sound of a freight train doesn't wake your child then the call of a full bladder about to empty won't ether.

Although wetting may occur in all stages of the sleep cycle, one factor is consistently associated with bed wetting, the intensity of sleep. Almost universally, parents report that their children who wet by night sleep more heavily than sibling who don't bed wet, or more heavily than parent will consider average. In what some parent have called "dead sleep" children move around very little, are not easily roused from their slumber, and, when awakened, are often disoriented.

Among traditional medical scientists, however, deep sleep, or perhaps more correctly "failure of arousal", is a controversial explanation for bedwetting problems. Most scientist approach a problem by defining the characteristic of its parts. In other words scientist need to quantify what they observe. We have measurement system for weight, height, even for such amorphous characteristic as intelligence. This ability to measure is the foundation for scientific investigation.

In the case of bedwetting problems, scientist want to measure the relationship between deep sleep and wetting. One recent study attempted to do so by monitoring the sleep pattens of fifteen enuretic boys and eighteen boys who did not wet. The researchers, at the university of Ottawa, first allow they boys to sleep uninterrupted for two nights, so they can adjust to the monitoring equipment. Before the third night's sleep, all the boys put on headphones and were instructed to press a button three time and say "I am awake" upon hearing a tone as they slept. The result, The children who did not bed wet responded more often to the tone than children who did wet. The enuretic boys awoke only 8.5 percent of the time, while the nonenuretic boys awoke 39.6 percent of the time. This simple study support the generally accepted concept that children who wet at night are oblivious to everything, whether is a tone ringing in their ear or their bladder signaling its fullness.