The Importance of Understanding Parental Perception When Treating Primary Nocturnal Enuresis: A Topic Review and an Institutional Experience

Primary nocturnal enuresis (PNE) is a common childhood disorder that adversely affects a child’s mental well-being and social life. Our clinical experience showed parents and their child often have significantly different perspective of enuresis, and these differences can affect family dynamics, treatment approaches, and treatment success. Parents’ perception of PNE also influences the likelihood of seeking medical treatment, and we found parents of children with enuresis have markedly different beliefs regarding bedwetting than those of physicians. Because achieving remission for PNE requires parents and their child to actively participate in treatment, assessing their expectancy of success and their beliefs will allow clinicians to adjust treatment goals as necessary. When treating PNE, guidelines consistently recommend incorporating bed alarms as part of the therapy. However, through interviewing parents and treating their children, we found parents preferred medications or other behavioral strategies, such as limiting water intake, because of their convenience. Many parents would complain bed alarms woke them up instead of their child, and they would soon give up on bed alarms. Part of assessing their beliefs includes assessing their confidence in their child being able to wake up to alarms and to persist with treatment. Understanding how they manage and approach setbacks will also determine the treatment modality suited for their child. In this review paper, we detailed our experiences interviewing parents and treating their child with NE with urodynamics and medications at the Changhua Christian Hospital in Taiwan.