I receive a lot of questions every month about toileting difficulties. One question I am asked is what to do about fecal smearing. It’s an upsetting behavior because of the smell, mess, and unhygienic situation. Parents worry that fecal smearing will happen when their child is outside of their home – at school, daycare, or in a public place. It…
The topic of toilet training or toileting issues continues to be my most frequently asked question. I’m asked what to do about withholding a bowel movement, toileting readiness, fecal smearing, constipation, continued use of diapers, elimination on the floor or other inappropriate place, and how to teach the toileting process. These are all very important questions that can be hard…
The most frequently asked questions I get tend to be about toileting training the child with ASD. The biggest quandry is knowing when to start the process. In many cases, you can’t use the typically developing child guidelines as these may not apply to a child with developmental delays. Although I have never found a study to confirm this, I feel that language development may be a factor in toilet training/readiness. The more limited the language skills are, the more delayed toilet training is. I am not saying, though, that a child with no verbal skills can’t be toilet trained. Both of my children were late talkers (almost 5 years of age) and both were late toilet trainers. My son was 9.5 years and my daughter 6 years old. They were both trained for uriniation earlier than that, at about age 4, but it was the bowel movement that was the hardest thing to train.
There is almost no literature available on training the older child with autism. Traditional children’s books all use the potty chair to teach toilet training. Animated characters on videos do not explain the elimination process or show exactly what to do. It took us nine years to get my son Marc using the toilet on his own, and here is how we did it.
I am often asked the question when is the best time to start toilet training and how does a parent know when their child is ready to be trained. Personally, I think the summer can be a great time to start because school is finished and there are fewer day to day demands on the child. The less people involved in the toileting process, the easier it is. If you are a family that stays at home for the summer or just takes a short holiday, the summer break can be an ideal time to start. Both of my children were toilet trained over the summer – Julia at age 6 and Marc at age 9.