HAPPY+HEALTHY Kids’ health
Bathroom blues SIX MONTHS PREGNANT with her second child, Michelle Boyd* was at a pelvic physiotherapy appointment for prevention of postpartum bladder issues when she learned that the exercises she was doing to strengthen and relax her pelvic floor might also help kids with their own potty problems. Boyd’s seven-year-old son still needed Pull-Ups at night and she was desperate for him to stop wetting the bed. She’d tried everything over the years, from giving him oral laxatives to help with underlying constipation to an underwear-attached sensor that would trigger an alarm in the middle of the night when he started to pee. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she says. The family’s paediatrician finally told her to stop exhausting herself with all the nightly wakings and laundry and just keep her son in training pants until he stopped wetting on his own. But Boyd’s physiothera-
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todaysparent.com April+May 2021
pist had another idea. She suggested Boyd look into pelvic physiotherapy for kids. Over the last few years, the importance of pelvic health for mothers—and the lasting effects that pregnancy and childbirth can wreak on women’s bodies—has become common knowledge. More recently, paediatric pelvic physiotherapy has become an emerging treatment for children with bladder and bowel dysfunctions that can lead to constipation, daytime or nighttime incontinence, and urinary tract infections, among other problems. “Paediatric pelvic health issues are common but often ignored,” says Catherine MacGillivray, a paediatric-trained pelvic health physiotherapist based in Calgary. According to the Canadian Paediatric Society, 10 to 15 percent of five-year-olds, and six to eight percent of eight-year-olds, experience bedwetting. Daytime accidents, defined as those accidents that
ILLUSTRATION: JORDAN CARTER
Pelvic floor exercises aren’t just for moms. Paediatric physiotherapy and muscle retraining may help older kids with daytime accidents and bedwetting.
