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| Image credit: Photo by Just Taken Pics on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
To those of you without children, there are probably few things less interesting or appealing that the subject of toilet training. The fact that we parents engage in such discussions with amazing fervor may even make you wary of having children of your own. (What has happened to parents to make them so weird and boring?) But the truth is, we're enthusiastic about toilet training because we're really, really tired of being so involved in the products of someone else's bowels.
Almost all parents nurture a secret despair that their child may never learn to use a toilet. They picture their children packing up the car to head off to college still wearing diapers (and unable to sleep through the night). Most kids do figure it out eventually, but for some it's a lot more work than others. And it can be especially challenging for autistic children. My son toilet trained at 4, and after having helped him successful navigate that transition, I felt like I should be the reigning toilet training champion of the world. (Really, why aren't there ever Olympic competitions in categories I know I could win?)
The first challenge we faced, like many other parents of autistic children, was overcoming Austen's fear of the loud, cold sensory nightmare known as the toilet, which happens (unfortunately) to be located in the echo chamber that is the bathroom. While Austen was ok with taking baths, it took some work just to get him to venture into the vicinity of the toilet itself. We spent some time trying to get a sense of exactly what it was that was disturbing about the toilet and found that, for him, it was of the sound of flushing and of toilet lid and seat bumping against porcelain as it was raised or lowered.
We put rugs on the floor and covered the seat to help muffle the sounds. We had also found that Austen was less nervous about sounds when he was able to control them, so we had Austen slowly take control of raising and lowering the lid: first by having him direct us so that we would move slowly, carefully and quietly, and then by having him do it himself. We gradually made the flushing more tolerable by having him stand outside the bathroom as we flushed. We moved him closer, bit by bit, allowing him to cover his ears, until he was able to get close enough to flush for himself with our hands over his ears. After several months, Austen was able to touch and flush the toilet comfortably.
Next, we began Project Sit on the Toilet. Austen clearly thought putting naked flesh on the cold seat and hanging over a big watery abyss was nothing short of insanity, so he sat on the toilet clothed at first with the lid closed. From there we moved to having him sit clothed on a training seat that fit over the adult seat; we held him to reassure him he was not going to fall in. (He seemed to be convinced that he would be the first 4-year-old in human history to fall into that tiny training hole.) Eventually he was able to sit on the toilet with his diaper on. I had him practice sitting on the toilet first thing in the morning, when I knew he was most likely to need to pee, and as he grew comfortable with sitting there, he would pee in the diaper while on the toilet. However, at this point we got stuck. We could not get him to take the diaper off, which as you can imagine, really defeats the purpose of toilet training.
Fortunately, I was determined, innovative and totally, totally sick of changing diapers. One morning, I put him in a diaper with a hole cut in it, so that what would have gone into the diaper would fall into the toilet instead. The first time Austen tried it out, he was a little surprised by the tinkling sound of urine on water, but he held it together, and after a few more days of practice, with gradually widening holes and gradually disappearing diapers, we began to approach the point where most other children start the process of toilet training...
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