Son Peeing in His Room

I had some probs with this with my son soon after he was finished potty training. He would hide and do his "duty". I started making him clean up his own mess. A bottle of vinegar and a rag do wonders. Believe me, they learn. :D

my daughter was peeing on the carpet in our bedroom (we cosleep so it is her bedroom too) for a while during her 3 and 4 year old years...even peed on my ex-fiance's side of the bed. she would pee on the couch too...it was just awful. she also would pee in her sleep during more stressful times w/ me once we moved away from ex fiance and i was having a hard time on my own (which i still do sometimes...but i'm working even harder on not being a total monster of a mother despite being a stress case) i think she was stressed out from my ex-fiance and i arguing so much... she hasn't been peeing in her sleep for months now. yay!

so i am wondering what kind of relationship you have at home with your husband...how is it going? do you fight in front of the kids? could your son be feeling insecure about something like this that may be going on? or regarding how you are responding to your son when he does things that are annoying or whatever? is he feeling shamed...or...?

you also mentioned he's speaking of 'monsters'. that raises a red flag to me that maybe someone in his life (you, your husband...his daycare provider...) has him upset and scared. i have found that young children will talk about and draw monsters when they are feeling afraid and unsafe on some level or another. even if being yelled at a lot...still, emotionally they don't feel safe. i have also found this to be true when i've been yelling and way too gruff with my own daughter who is 5 now.

your son sounds like he is definitely freaked out about something and he is trying to express that to you...and probably trying to ground himself and stake his territory in some primal subconsious way...in hopes of feeling more secure or having some sort of 'say' or power in his life...he definitely seems shaken up about something.

of course it wouldn't hurt to rule out a possible urinary tract infection. maybe he has one and it hurts or something and he is just not telling you...? so he is feeling safer by sneaking his peeing into his room? maybe doing it moreso since he sees you are bothered by it? it definitely sounds like a scared boy right now and needing some sort of control in his life.

oh as far as monster deterrent having parents who are peaceful and loving despite however a child acts (not always easy, i know!!!) and saying something like you know what sweetie, monsters don't like ducks...(or whatever...) so see this hear duck...it will keep them away. also monsters do NOT like mommies. sooo no monsters in THIS house, then! or act like ducks together and stomp and waddle around like ducks. hmmm. good luck mama. i really think he is freaking out about something...and you probably would know best what that might be. it doesn't even have to be anything major. it just might be he doesn't like how daddy has been gone so much or raising his voice to you or that you seem displeased with this or that...who knows. as for urine and germs i wouldn't worry about it. people can live off the stuff for a while if need be. keep us posted. hope this helps!?

We dealt with this not to long ago. Somethings that helped was explaining to our son that there are no monsters, and then walking him to the bathroom. We also put a nightlight in the bathroom so that when it was dark he could still see in there and always leave the door to the bathroom wide open. At one point we realized he was doing it because it was easier then going to the bathroom. We would immediately make him clean the mess (or at least help) then put him on a time out. He seemed to get the idea after the third time that peeing in his room is unacceptable.
With the monster situation, a friend of ours also used the air freshener/squirt bottle method which worked wonders. She labeled the bottle Monster Spray, and told her son that whenever he thought there might be a monster spray it and the monster would disappear. The son used it for a month or so before finally just getting over it.

A.,

As crazy as this may sound, do his underwear fit or are they too small? My son turned 5 last week, and for a while he was having accidents (peeing his pants). He's only been fully potty trained for about 8 months (long story). I went to the store and looked at the fitting guide on the back of the boxes of underwear and discovered that he was 2 sizes too small. Bought him some new undies, and poof! the peeing in his pants stopped.

Another thought is to go into the bathroom before him and "scare" all the monsters away so he can pee. Again, my son was having a monster issue in his room. Dad or I would go in, jump at the place he said the monster was, growl pretty loudly, and say "raaarrrrggh! go away you monster". He would crack up.

Hope this helps,
Melissa

I don't have any actual advice but I wanted to let you know that I have heard of this happening several times. I actually talked to my honey about it as well...he said that when it would happen to him he was in a half lucid state so he was walking but he really did think he was in the bathroom. My nephew has been know to do this - he pees in the trashcan and swears everytime that he was in the bathroom...one night my sister was actually still up and she watched him....no defiance!!! I would caution that however you proceded you make sure that there is no shame involved for him...this is something he has little control over...make sure he knows he is not a bad kid and especially make sure he knows his body is not bad!!! I know cleaning up pee is no fun...you have all my sympathies!

Best of luck!
L.

He's probably scared of the dark - tell him that if he turns the lights on, he can see whether or not there are monsters (or scare them away)! He can turn on the light in his room, then turn on the lights on the way to the bathroom, and all the way back. I don't know about the comment about people in a child's life affecting them to where they make up monsters to deal with it - I don't think kids are usually that complex. Probably he really truly thinks there are animals or monsters hiding under the bed or behind the door. Kids can be irrational! I sure thought all that when I was five.

Hello,
My name is Steve...the 25 year old son of Jeanne who holds this account. She let me read this posting, and I felt obligated to respond.
When I was 5...I did the EXACT same thing. I remember it vividly. I would wake up in the middle of the night and pee in my heater vent. I figured this was an ingenious plan, as there would be no soaking wet evidence come morning. What I didn't have the foresight to predict however, is just what would happen when the furnace kicked on. Oh the smell of my room. My sister used to make fun of me cause it smelled like pee...every time the pet parakeets my parents kept buying would die (all of which I named 'Yoda')my sister would tell me it was because my room smelled like pee. Now bare in mind I also had an issue with wetting the bed until I was about 8 years old. This I attribute to an eary onset of sleep apnea, which I encounter even today on a much more severe scale. So heater vent or no...my room was destined to smell like pee.
So the reason I did this was and still is VERY clear to me. My room was at the end of a dark hallway, and my parents frequently complained about the electric bill (still do). The hall was dark, and the bathroom was all too far in those days. I was and still am a VERY creative person, who could conjure up about anything in that hallway, so needless to say, venturing even to turn on the light in the hallway was just like Alien 3 to me. This made peeing in the heater vent a well justified solution to this problem. Again, leaving the light on was not an option, but even if we had...the dark area further down the hall very well could have been home to aliens, monsters, ghosts, John McCain, etc.
Anyway, a solution...well first, please don't reprimand your son for his imagination. You can tell us little boys that there of course aren't monsters, but unfortunately our imaginations, even 25 years later are still far more powerful than what our mothers have to say. I would say try leaving the light on, or provide some kind of basin in his room that he can be proud to pee in. That would have solved it for me. Also, my mom just mentioned something that she did for me. She armed me with a spray bottle full of "Monster Spray", which was of course just a sprayer full of water. I don't remember how I felt about that, but my mom claims I loved it and would spray it like crazy.
I eventually passed this stage, probably about the same time we had repairs done to the furnace. Like I said, I still wet the bed for quite sometime but my conscious urination efforts moved on to places like our second story front window, and my super soaker...which was then used on my sister.
So I hope this helps. I feel for your son...the dark hallway can be quite the scary place when you have grumpy old political figures on the loose (in my time it was H.W. Bush).

-steve

I am a little confused about whether this is an all-the-time thing or if it is only at night. If it is mostly at night (just before bed, after bedtime, etc.) then it is probably fear based. If he is doing this during the day, too, then it's a total control/defiance thing.

Avoid calling him a liar, because he won't feel that he can come to you about things and will find his own coping methods (which may not be healthy). If he has a fear of monsters (he's only 5, so it's not unrealistic) then find a way to make him feel comfortable with it. Monster Spray, shutting all doors and "locking" them, putting a rubberband on the door knob, leaving on a nightlight. Acknowledge that the dark can be spooky sometimes, but it doesn't have to be all the time.

Good luck with this and keep us posted!

My son was a very sound sleeper and sometimes would do that. I would make sure that before I went to bed, I would get him up and walk him into the bathroom, (his eyes shut) and have him go. If you can hear him get up in the night, do the same thing. If you want to try to put a garbage can by the bed, he may use that if he isn't awake.

My grandson did and said exactly this when I was raising him. I put in night lights everywhere, which also helped me to get there faster, forced myself to sleep lightly so I could hear him up, limited his water intake 1.5 hrs before bed, tried the waking him 2 hrs after sleep to get him to pee (didn't work that well), used monster spray before bed and gave him a bottle of it (used some of my calgon style perfume so the smell was familiar to him of me), reassured him that I would protect him from any monsters, explained how pee in the carpet was hard to get out, made his room stink, germs, and likely would attract monsters b/c they like yucky things like that, and dozed on the floor outside the door to his room where he couldn't see me for a few weeks (yeah, that was tough) so I could be there when it happened and help him to the bathroom. It was then I discovered he was sleep walking, which my daughter had also done. I'd already learned with her that incriminating harranging didn't work, so this time just helped him to pee in the toilet, used the monster spray on the way there, and helped him back to bed. After that I put a plastic trash can in his room and told him it was okay to use it he was afraid to go to the bathroom. He never did, but didn't have any problems with it after that. He did wake up and call me a few times to get rid of the monsters so he could go, but the problem went away in about a month. I also made sure I focused more time on him, reduced my own stress level so it was less apparent to him, and tried to give him a sense of security in the world, and did some special fun activities with just him which gave him back the feeling of connection and specialness, and that I'd be there to protect him.

I too thought it was defiance at first, but finally learned that it was just insecurity. He's still an insecure sort of boy, but learning more abilities in the world which is bringing him out of that. As he's learning that he can control his own fears, conquor them, it's giving him the belief he needs in himself to stop being insecure.

Oh, he's still afraid of the dark and monsters in his room and he's 7, but uses the techniques I used then to deal with it. Although he says he doesn't need more monster spray. Once he asked me where to buy it and I told him that I had a friend that knew all sorts of magic and she was a wonderful woman and made this stuff special for him, but that she didn't have any bottles so I poured out my perfume bottle so she could use it b/c I loved him so much and wanted him to be safe so loss of my perfume was a good sacrifice to make for him. That really impressed him. At 6, after we moved, he asked me if I could still get more monster spray even though we moved and I told him not from the same friend but if he needed it I could find someone, and if not here I could write the friend and ask her to mail some. Later I told him that she'd sent some but didn't have the perfume bottle so had used one of hers (explaining the different bottle as he questions every detail). He said he appreciated it but didn't need it. It's still sitting on my dresser. He looks at it, but never touches or asks. I think he likes knowing it's there.

Good Luck!

This might be a monster in the toilet thing. There are some books out about this. This also might be a man to boy thing, and your husband might be the one to talk to him. You also might consider putting one of those small training pottys in his room, at least he won't go on the rug. And last resort talk to the doctor about it.

A friend had this problem with her son. He still believed in Santa so, my Dad called their house pretending to be Santa. He told the boy that he could see that he was being naughty (this little one actually tried to blame it on his dog!) and he would not get any presents for Christmas if he didn't stop. That got his attention and he stopped peeing in his room. I know it's not really honest but, if it saves your carpet, I think it's worth it! Good luck!

Is your son just peeing in his room at night or durring nap time? Is your son a sound sleeper? If he is only peeing in his room durring the night or at nap time and he is a sound sleeper it could be because he is not fully awake when he gets up to go pee. Boys often pee their pants and or bed (or in your case the floor) at night for several years until they get to the point where the urge to pee will fully wake them up long enough for them to make the trip to the bathroom. My boy did this for many years. I frequently would take him to the bathroom a time or two at night before I went to bed so that I could hopefully avoid an accident. He didn't actually quit peeing in his room and/or his bed until he was a teenager. This did make it a problem when it came to him going places over night so I would have to warn the parents that this may happen as he really could not help it.

As to the monster thing a lot of the ideas that the other people mentioned are some really good ideas as to how to attach this situation. My son was not scared of monsters but my daughter was. For her it worked when I placed a Bible under her bed (she thought the evil monsters were under her bed). I told her that monsters of any kind would never come around a Bible. That problem was quickly solved. She would check to be sure the Bible was still there every night before she went to bed then she felt safe.

The issue may be sooo many different things, and you don't say whether it is at night or during the day. I think a good place to start would be to put a potty chair or other appropriate peeing container in his room so at least he is peeing in a non-destructive way. If it is night time, he may be too scared to leave his room. It may also be some completely unrelated emotional issue. My 5 year old nephew did the same thing, and once he started counseling and his parents started giving him more positive one-on-one time, the room peeing stopped.

A.,
I haven't had to deal with anyting like this but have you tried explaining to your son about germs? I know my 5 yr old boy thinks germs are gross and doesnt want to get sick...just and idea.

K.