The following is a selection from the book Raising Children Who Think For Themselves by Dr. Eisa Medhus. From the chapter titled "Specific Child Rearing Challenges - How to Handle Them to Encourage Self-Direction", the following introduction is offered.

"The best way to make children good is to make them happy." - Oscar Wilde

Here are some inner-directed suggestions that will help with some of the most trying child-rearing difficulties we may stumble upon. All of these approaches are designed to preserve your children's ability to rely on internal dialogue instead of external influences to assess and correct their behavior. Using this section as a ready reference will help you raise a self-directed child, even if it means carrying the book, tattered and tear-stained, to the market, in the car, or at home. There are some challenges that, I hope you will never have to face, but others will be as inevitable as a pimple on prom night.

To get to self-direction, there are a few universal caveats for every one of the situations that follow. First, our children need to understand and agree with both the need for the furl and the consequence for breaking it. Only when they come to agree with our rules, through their own internal dialogue, will they become self-directed. Second, look to your own parenting strategy as the possible source of some of the problem. Are you over-controlling or over-protective? Either trait can elicit an externally directed response, as your children react to an unhealthy situation. Third, remember for all these parenting challenges how important it is for you as parents, to model the right behavior. If you're expecting your children to act one way and you act another, the double standard will throw a monkey wrench into their whole internal dialogue machinery.

And lastly, don't forget to laugh.

Bed-Wetting

Why they do it

Most experts view bed-wetting as a sign of an immature neurological system or perhaps a type of sleep disorder. Recent medical research, however, has found that many children who wet the bed may have a deficiency during sleep of an important hormone known as anti-diuretic hormone (ADH). ADH helps to concentrate urine during sleep hours. Testing of many bed-wetting children has shown that these children do not show the usual increase in ADH during sleep. Children with enuresis, therefore, often produce more urine during the hours of sleep than their bladders can hold. If they don't wake up, the bladder releases the urine, and the child wets the bed.

If they've been dry all night for a long period of time and then begin to wet their bed, you need to consult their physician, because this could be an indication of a physical or emotional problem.

Logical consequences

Give your children the responsibility of removing the wet sheet from their beds, washing the sheets, and replacing them with new ones. They might need some help with this task, depending on their age, but even children as young as four or five can manage the lion's share of this task.

Solutions toward self-direction

Again, never ridicule or punish your children for bed-wetting. They simply can't help it, and you're just asking for years of professional counseling bills for them if you make it an issue of shame. Other than the logical consequences mentioned above, there are no self-directed solutions to this problem. The condition is largely physical and maturational. Internal dialogue is important only in their handling bed-wetting without stigma rather than in stopping it altogether.