Non-verbal children and potty training | Autism PDD
I am interested in this topic as well. My dd is 3 years old ,non-verbal, and I am having an very difficult time with potty training.
We are still working on this, but the boys tap the front of their pants, and I know they either need to go or they already went and want changed. Most often its that they need changed. I had a preschool teacher in DC decide when they were 3 it was time to push and it was a huge mistake. I heard from another parent who would show up out of the blue that many times she walked in on them sitting on the toilet red faced and screaming. I was so mad, I had them sitting on the toilet and everything, they majorly regressed. So it is now hit and miss, but we are working on it. They are still getting over the fear of the toilet, but a treasure box and animal stickers have really helped with at least getting them to sit on the toilet. Nikolas has recently started saying poop when he either wants to go or already went. Also they will pull me to the bathroom.
I should probably add that Nikolas is getting more verbal and is starting to use it to express needs and wants, every day seems like a new phrase or word I didn't know he knew, this has happened just in the last 6 months or so. Andrew tries to speak but everything sounds like uh-uh-uh. We are seriously considering pecs. But before the language started improving tapping the pants or dragging me to the bathroom was the most common. The tapping the pants thing is something they came up with all on their own. You might also think about using the sign for potty.
I find wet diapers all over the house; he'll just run off and change lickety-split.Unfortunately he also does this for dirty diapers, and I will smell you-know and be going crazy searching everywhere, because those he likes to "hide". I can't STAND the smell of poop in a house...I like my house clean and it drives me crazy...it makes me really freak out. So I have to chase him at literally the first whif that he might have gone, or have to watch him like a hawk to see if he looks like he's going and it's just one more exhausting thing, and I'm not always successful.
He will happily go on the potty (it's just that nothing comes out). He sits down; he even holds his Mr. Happy down with his finger so nothing can spray up. The fact that nothing is coming out in the first place doesn't stop him from using the finger...you show C something once, he'll do it for the next ten years that way. Anyway, he then counts to twenty (or counts to ten, then fills in a bunch of sounds and ends with something like "twenty" and claps), gets down, puts a square of clean toilet paper into the toilet, flushes and asks to wash his hands by standing on tiptoes at the basin. He carefully dries his hands, gets a new diaper and there you go. Good as new.
The only thing missing in this equation is something other than clean toilet paper actually going into the pot...
It's really frustrating for me.
My stepdaughter was non-verbal at potty training. We had introduced the potty back when she was 2 but for reasons that would take too long to explain, it wasn't until the was 3 years 4 mo that she would go on the potty. I think she understood the potty but diapers were too convenient so she would fuss and fight not to sit on the potty. Her dad had better luck than I getting her to sit on it but rarely would she pee. Sometimes she did and we would celebrate and if she didn't we did not act sad. The day Hannah brought a diaper out to us was the\ day I knew that she knew what was going on. She had been exposed to the potty for a year ( I don't really recommend waiting that long, though) and so we put her in underwear. And she would pee her pants and her face would look pained and we'd say "come on, lets sit on the potty". She would sit on the potty (and usually not go again). We would ask her "do you need to use the potty?" sometimes she would shake her head no and sometimes she wouldn't acknowledge us. We kept the potty in plain view ( in the livingroom). After about a month of weekends (we only see her on weekends and her mother does not communicate Hannahs status very well)wearing underwear and peeing on the floor she began to go to the potty herself. She doesn't announce it. She doesn't call us for help. She really gives no signs that she needs to go. I've also observed that she can hold it for a long time. 9 hours was the longest I know of. We had a standoff one night when she wanted a diaper to sleep in but we wanted her to use the potty first, then diaper. All 3 of us were wrecks at the end of the stand off, but she peed in the potty and we celebrated.
I guess my point is that he may not ever tell you he needs to go. Keep the potty visible or make sure he knows wher it is. Ask him frequently if he needs to go. Make sure he can pull down his pants by himself and has seen the whole peeing routine (I'm sure he has) and he will get it eventually. He may pee his pants a number of times before gets it, but try to help him through the transition and make it not too stressfull for him.
We have since moved the potty from the living room to the bathroom and now we have it on the toilet with the base flipped over as a step. Hannah wakes up in the morning and uses the toilet on her own. She never calls to us for help. Sometimes she will walk in the room with her pants down to indicate that sometthing has happened. But she never acted like those kids in the pampers commercials where they announce "I gotta go!"
That's been our experience with the potty. I hope it helps.
Molly, Stepmom to Hannah, 3.75 years old.
Try getting rid of diapers completely and see what happens when there aren't any more. You will probably go through a couple days of complete and total melt down, BUT... it sounds like he gets the concept and knows exactly what he's supposed to do..... HE JUST DOESN'T WANT TO. Maker the diapers disappear and see what happens.Ds would hold his pant in the front so we know he wants to potty.
Concernedpa.
Thanks, all!Oh God, I am SO afraid of getting rid of the diapers altogether...I'm envisioning a urine and feces smell pervading my house...but I do keep hearing this one so maybe I'll bite the bullet and do it over the upcoming week's vacation. Our kids get off the entire Thanksgiving week.
Stepmom, you sure sound like a good stepmom. Very caring and very involved. I wanted to give you kudos for that. How sweet to read your post, b/c I could hear how much you care. We do keep the potty where C can get it. Actually, we've had the potty so long--about two years now--that he's actually too big for it, his knees kind of go up around his ears, so now we have the blue "donut" and he picks it up and places it on the Big Potty and sits down. He has access to that.
Thanks again, everybody.
We used to put Hannah in a diaper just for bed time but she figured it out and held her pee in from about noonish until bed when she would sit on the potty, not do anything and then pee in the diaper when it was on.
One night at my mothers house her routine was a little disturbed and my husband put Hannah to bed in underwear and didn't put her on the potty ( she was very tired). She woke up crying at 1:30 am completely dry. Then I remembered she didn't go potty and was wearing underwear. My husband was going to put a diaper on he right away but I insisted she sit on the potty first. She resisted. She was crying, resisting the potty and holding herself. We just spoke calmly to her and waited until she was ready. She finally went on the potty. The next night was the standoff I wrote about earlier.
Luckily for us it was only 2 nights of battling and the diapers were gone for good. I would still pack underwear and a pair of pants when we went out just in case. Thankfully we didn't have to use them.
This board is great. It's great to talk about this stuff with people who are actually interested and understand.
For parents of kids who were non-verbal when they potty trained, how did your kids indicate to you that they needed to go potty?Our biggest problem with potty training is that C really can't tell us he needs to go...or, I guess, we don't even know IF he realizes it's coming...he never makes any non-verbal indication. Any tips? I don't mind diapers all that much on principle but at this point I admit it's getting a little old.
I'm a parent of a verbal kid so it may be hard to compare... BUT the first things we did were this:
We would, on our estimate of time, actually bring the potty to our boy to pee. He was probably 3 yrs old then (he's 8 now). Of course, whether he had anything to pee or not was another matter. BUT the action of having the potty in front of him, pulling down his pants.... and making the "shhiiishh" sound.... eventually got the message through.
So after days, weeks of literally at times chasing him around with the potty. Then comes the verbal part... When there's no pee, we would ask, "Any shi-shi?" If he didn't want to say, he'll just shake the head. I'll repeat the question... if he still shakes the head, then I'll say... "OK. If no shi-shi, then Daniel you must say NO SHI-SHI" ... "If got you must say YES SHI-SHI"
Well eventually he caught on.... occasionally too good... like when he'll say "Papa SHI-SHI" .... And before I could reach him with the potty, he'll be spraying his pee all over the floor with a laugh and a grin on his face !!!
*****Laughing my butt off right now- Adam just informed the entire house that Daddy made a poopie fart
We tried several times over the summer to take away the diapers and potty train him. One time we even took a week off from his two therapeutic preschools to knuckle down and get it done. But, when we took him back thinking we were almost there and one of the well meaning but ditzy aides at his afternoon preschool put a pull up on him it all came to a screeching halt. When it comes right down to it, Adam is just lazy. If he doesn't have to take a break from playing with his toys, or watching tv or just whatever it is he is doing because he can go peepee in his diaper he won't. It's much eaisier and faster to just pee in the diaper. He knew for well over a year how to go pee pee in the potty, but it took us completely removing diapers from the house and forcing him to do it to get the job done.
We had a lot of accidents, and I had to have our carpets cleaned not once, not twice, but FOUR times before I was satisfied with the smell (that was just from the urine
Well I still would not consider our dd fully PT'd because even though she will hold #1 forever she just will not tell us when she needs to go. So I just take her with me whenever I go about every 3-4 hrs and she will go. It took a long time just to get to that point. She does go in her little potty without even telling me but I will always know because she will come out with a new pair of undies on so I go to check. We tried pics and signing and she is verbal but just will not tell us.
I have been putting off even dealing with the whole potty training thing because my dd doesn't seem to have ANY signs that she's ready. She turned 3 in august though and I want to start doing something (I also have many people on my BACK about getting this thing going!) Anyway, I just ordered a book online called "Toilet Training for Individuals with Autism and related Disorders" and I got it from a website called www.autismshop.com It's really very helpful, and specifically addresses all the extra challenges of doing this with autistic kids.Our NT daughter Imogen toilet trained herself at 17 months old. (If I hadn't seen it happen I wouldn't believe either) She was newly verbal, but would make a throat clearing sound as her indication that she needed to use the toilet. It took her 3 days to convince me she knew what she was doing, but she did. At the same time as all of this was happening, her Pdd-Nos big bro. Sam, 2+1/2 years older was having lots of trouble, and I think hearing the coaching he was getting helped Imogen figure out what to do. Sam is now almost 11, and has bowel accidents every day. He's better with wees, but is leaky there too due to nerve problems caused by all the withholding. Now Rhiannon, our NT 2 year old is completely trained... and actively coaching Sam
I think for both the girls hearing the mechanics talked about openly made a big difference, but also its clear to me that no amount of talking about listening to your body is ever going to help Sam, and that the biggest hurdle we face with him is getting him motivated to accept help to train his bowel so that he can be in control. He doesn't care how bad he smells, and he is defiant as a reflex response to being asked to use the loo. I wouldn't hate toileting as an issue so much if he would just ask for/accept help when he had an accident.
Hey, all. Here's something funny...the reason I'm revisiting my own thread is that I was Googling for further help and this thread came up. I was reading the brief description on the Google page and as I clicked on the link I thought, "Oh hey, this sounds EXACTLY like my problem. -------- Oh."An update: C's teacher insists C is ready and asked me to try to train C over the long week off to come. He only has school Monday and the rest of the week he's off, so I decided to start him this evening. I bought him Spiderman, Cars and Thomas the Tank Engine underwear, 10 pairs total.
Oh, God, he wet more than once an hour. Doesn't this mean he isn't ready?
He can't hold his pee for even one hour, and it's little dribbles, not a big stream.He did pee once on the toilet tonight and it was a total surprise because I heard him counting, which is what he always does on the potty, except he doesn't usually actually pee. He just counts to 10, sings his version of the ABC song and gets down. Anyway, I had prepped him with the Potty Time with Bear movie, showing him the sign for "toilet" (making the ASL "T" and shaking the hand around) and letting him know he'd get candy if he put his peepee into the toilet. (That's the only way I know of to describe it to him...I don't know how to get any clearer than that.) Anyway, when I heard him singing, I ran in and HE WAS PEEING. Now granted it pretty much all went on the floor since he was sitting facing forward and his legs were kind of together but I flipped out with joy, gave him his candy, had Daddy praise him and the whole nine.
But that was it...after that, FOUR more wet diapers in the next three hours. Then it was bedtime.
If he's wet that often, does it mean he's not ready? Also, I am deathly afraid that the sudden leaps he's made in speaking these past two weeks--going from virtually non-verbal to full sentences--will disappear under the stress of potty training.ETA: Oh, and Julie, thanks for the choline tip...I'm hesitant to start C on anything else right now as he's already on Zeolite and Primal Defense. my son is 5 with ds/asd and still is not potty trained. I know the school is helping us with this issue...but still no progress. His sister is 2 1/2 and potty trained we thought this may help him but didn't...I have tried the diapers off and underwear only but my steam cleaner gets used more than the potty...I could use some help in this area as well My ABA coordinater suggested a long weekend in the bathroom. Lots of drinks and the TV set up in there. Keep them on the potty until they have a lot of sucesses. She said it worked. We have yet to try it. I'm thinking Christmas break for us. The problem is they are little sneaks and go off and pee when your not looking. If you stay in the bathroom, you will get success. It can't hurt to try. My ds is almost 7 and nonverbal.
Around the time that my son had just turned three I was starting to despair a little. We knew that he knew how to go potty, and we knew that he was too lazy to go potty.... but it seemed like he didn't always know when he needed to go potty. He had always been one of those babies that would sit in a poopy or wet diaper until it was falling off of him if nobody took the initiative to change him....he would never, ever cry about an uncomfortable diaper.
I had heard about a supplement called Choline that was supposed to help with attention. Problem was I couldn't find it in a form that would mix easily into Adams milk (I probably wasn't looking hard enough) so at the advice of an extremely knowledgeable fellow parent of an ASD'er (is a whiz at supplements and biomedical stuff) I got lecithin granules (which have choline) from the vitamin shoppe to mix into his milk. Two days later while we were on vacation, he popped out of bed in the morning and the first words out of his mouth were, "Mommy, I need to go pee pee!"
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