In Reader's last post below, he notes that Pacific Int'l has the child, "awoken to pee an hour before the alarm". P.I. uses a wetness alarm to determine what time the child usually wets (which for most kids is about the same time each night, unless their fluid intake radically changes). Once the wetting time is determined, then a standard alarm clock can be used to awaken the child 1/2 to one hour prior to the usual wetting time. Again, the idea is to train the child to awaken in the night, and parents must help.
For a wetness alarm the association between a full bladder and the alarm occurence is not a very stong psychlogical association, as the child has already emptied the bladder when the alarm occurs. The wetness alarm teaches the child to wake up in the night, but it can be used to determine what time the child typically wets.
Teaching a child to wake up in the night takes real work. It's like helping an overweight child to lose weight. One third of "normal" people have to get up in the night to go to the toilet, myself and my daughter included. Should we be using diapers instead?
Tom believes that kids can not control wether they wake up to an alarm and that subtracting a reward if they fail to wake up is punishment. Kids may not be able to control wetting, but they can control hearing an alarm. It is the groggy feeling of pulling themselves out of a deep sleep that is so hard and which they learn to overcome. Subtraction of a reward for failure to awaken is standard procedure for the commonly used "Dry Bed" training procedure. And kids (and parents) can learn to go back to sleep after the child uses the toilet.
Carina says that her child was, "... so proud and happy about throwing the diapers away and go to sleepovers with his buddies." Training a child to wake up and use the toilet can avoid years of diapers and loss of sleepovers, lowered self-esteem, elevated temperature of the testicles, and risk of diaper fetish. It surely seems worth the effort...