How We Potty Trained My Special Needs Child
Apr 26 '01
The Bottom Line With patience, we were able to potty train my special needs child.
Whenever a parent has a developmentally delayed child such as I have with my youngest son who has high functioning autism, you are presented with many challenges. Things that many parents have little problems with or may take for granted are major obstacles for those of us who have these very special children.
Because we had a very big challenge concerning my youngest son with potty training, I would like to share many of the things that we tried to help my son accomplish this goal and become a “big boy”.
Urinary Training
I don’t know what it is about my youngest son but he urinates more often, longer, and greater quantity than any other child that I have ever seen in my life. Even if he would just urinate, it seems that only a few minutes later he would go again.
Training my son was a great challenge then. Even though I had a rather compassionate day care at the time, he was still basically untrained at the age of three even though we tried to introduce the concept at this time.
Most of the children were in training pants at the day care so just put him in them too. Eventually though it was apparent that we were going to have problems and if my son had not been accepted for special education, he would have been forced to leave the day care for not being trained at age four.
Even though I put my son in pullup training pants to go on the bus to his special needs school, he was often quite wet by the time that he would come home. I would be so tired of having to carry wet clothes reeking of urine home every day and washing them over and over to get the smell out.
His teacher was very compassionate and we tried a reward system. Candy and other types of rewards did not seem to make a difference, so she asked me what his most favorite thing to eat was in the world. I could answer that one quickly because at that time it was Doritos.
So, what we did was to put my son on a “fast” of Doritos. We would put a small bag of Doritos on the top of the shower curtain out of his reach. We explained to him that the only way that he could get these Doritos was to urinate in the toilet and then come get an adult to show us that he had gone in the commode.
The trick to this was that during the time that we were urinary training my son, that neither he nor anyone around him could give him Doritos at all. The only way that he would ever be able to smell or eat Doritos or even see them would be if he would go to the bathroom and urinate in the potty.
This proved to be a really great incentive and after about two weeks, he started to do it periodically in the commode, finally mastering it a few months later to allow for a much more versatile reward system of stars, candy, and small toys.
Stool Training
However, getting my son toilet trained for stools took much longer unfortunately.
My son would just not want to get near the potty or even a child’s potty to sit on it. I have absolutely no idea what frightened him so much about it, since he was not very verbal at that point of time, but he would just keep away from it.
I was continually amazed that he would be able to go all day at school without going to the bathroom for a stool and then after he got home he would go hide in the closet and do it in his pants. Not wanting to have it on him though he sometimes wouldn’t care if he smelled or had it on him or not and very often he did not wait till we got home but actually defecated in his pants after getting to the day care after school.
It was a very frustrating time for all of us. My son would not respond to the chip reward system or anything else that we tried.
In frustration I started to purchase almost every potty book that I could get my hands on without much success. He would read the story with me, seem bored and then do the same things that he would normally.
However, when I found the video Once Upon A Potty things began to change. My son started to sing with the children on the video about going to the potty and would watch the cartoon animation explaining the potty process.
Even though he would drive us crazy with playing this video at least three times a day, I allowed it because I wanted him to get the concept in his head that the stool belonged in the potty instead of his pants.
However, after watching the video for probably the 100th time, my son told me that those “babies” were going to the potty. I told him, “Those aren’t babies; those are BIG boys! You’re a big boy like THEY are, why don’t YOU go to the potty like THEY do?”
He looked at me like I was kind of crazy but then later, he came running to me to show me that he had gone to the potty and did it like the BIG boys did on the movie! Since that time he has not had a problem with going to the potty again.
Using Toilet Paper
Even though my son was stool trained, he still did not want to use toilet paper. This made a big mess as you could imagine. However, nothing I could figure out would entice him to wipe after using the bathroom.
One day in the store though, I found some flushable wet wipes that I felt that he would accept. After explaining to him that he could use these wipes to wipe himself instead of toilet paper, he started to use them.
In addition, I started to purchase him colored underwear as his brother wears and explained to him that he had to use wipes or toilet paper to make sure that his new and pretty underwear would stay nice looking.
Both of these things seem to help him want to wipe more but sometimes we still have times when he forgets.
Conclusion
I hope that my suggestions here help anyone who is trying to go through toilet training with their child. Even if you do not have a special needs child like I have, toilet training is a challenge that hopefully a child will respond to with a willingness to accomplish with pride and confidence.
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