Bedwetting: (n) involuntary urination during sleep.

Let me see.

We have Traffic Court. It is used very effectively for handling traffic cases.

Then there’s Divorce Court–for those who want to split the sheets in a legal way.

Family Court, which is more or less an oxymoron, since usually those who attend are having great difficulty being a family.

We have the Court of Appeals, which is obviously desperate for attention.

Yet over the years, we have gradually eroded the power and importance of the “Kid Court.”

This is the jurisdiction and judgments levied by children upon each other, creating the natural peer pressure which promotes general civility.

Let’s make something clear: refusing to pee in your bed is not a natural conclusion.

We are born urinating everywhere. We don’t care–take the diaper off too quickly and the baby will do it right in your face.

So somewhere along the line, we develop an aversion to the idea of peeing ourselves.

This has to come through some sort of instruction or protocol which forces us to fall in line and urinate in porcelain instead of linen.

I contend that every time we try to find a reason for bedwetting–other than the fact that the kid has not yet figured out to get up from a sleepy condition and void–we become overwrought, over-analytical and refuse to let “Kid Court” take care of the matter.

I occasionally peed the bed until the time I went to kindergarten. I thought everybody did.

So one day at recess, when someone complimented my pants, I explained that they were my second choice, since I had pissed on the others.

There was a silence that fell over the crowd that day near the merry-go-round. All my fellow students stared at me in disbelief. They had already made the journey away from bedwetting.

They did not bully me.

They did not ridicule me.

But it was made clear that until I learned how to use my “pee-pee’er” at the right time, I could not be “one of the gang.”

It put a crease in my brain so deep that it remains to this day.

I will tell you that nothing my mother or father could have said would have been more effective than the reaction of my chums, who found my conduct to be Neanderthal.

Taking away all peer pressure, which allows for kids to work out many foibles and weird inclinations, is a huge mistake. The best thing we can do is stand back and monitor it–and pull them apart just short of bloody noses.

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