Mailer: Elm [revision: 66.25]
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.autism
Date:         Thu, 21 Jan 1993 13:53:27 MST
              <AUTISM@SJUVM.BITNET>
From:         Jean Jasinski <jean@HPFELA.FC.HP.COM>
Subject:      Re: Toilet Training
              21, 93 10:44 am

Our 4 year old son just trained himself shortly before his 4th birthday.
He announced one day at daycare that he wanted to pee in the potty.
On the third try, he manged to succeed.  He was thereafter trained at
daycare, but not at home.  As soon as we threw out the diapers and after
he held his urine for 24 hours, he was done with urine training everywher.
Bowel training took another 3 weeks of accidents until we took his
favorite toy away for messing his pants.  Nothing we did (positive
strokes, rewards, making his clean his underwear in the toilet)
seemed to work.  When we took his trains away, within 20 minutes,
he was on the toilet having a bowel movement.

Azran and Foxx wrote a book called "Toilet Learning in Less than a Day"
which claims a phenomenally high success rate.  It is a stepped
behavior modification program which they claim will have an average
training time of 4 hours.  These numbers include training retarded
children.  The book was recommended to me by a team at The Eden Institute,
a specialized school for autistic children/adults in Princeton, NJ.  We
never tried it because our son WAS capable of holding his urine for 24
hours at a time.  I feared that we would sweat through a day and finally
have an accident at 9:00 right before bedtime.  I was unwilling to try
the program without local support (we live in Colorado).   You are not
supposed to try the program unless your child is fairly compliant and
we had to work on compliance first.

My son was physically ready to be trained.  His diaper had been dry in
the morning for almost a year.  He never wet his diaper during nap.  He
never wet his diaper or had a bowel movement unless he was at home or
in other designated "safe" places.  He was NOT modelling other
children at daycare because the other children were younger.  We did a
lot of talking about babies and how babies need diapers, and babies
don't have teeth.  And a friend of ours had recently given birth, so
he could see the difference between himself and the baby.  We also
reinforced his successes with candy (1 skittle for sitting, 2 for
peeing, 4 for producing a BM, and he added the rule that he got 6 for
having gas on the potty).  Until he expressed interest in using the
toilet, no amount of talk or prodding or bribing would work.  We bought
a video he had been requesting and let him carry it around happily with
the shrink wrap on).  Then he found out what he had to do to earn
it and he gave it back. :)  Make sure your child has the physical
readiness to before you begin training.

Motivation has always been difficult for Jason.  We have not been good
at figuring out what he wants/needs in order to produce.  Spend time
figuring out if your child likes social rewards (visits to special
people), food rewards (candy), or privileges,....  Be sure the reward
is IMMEDIATE!  If you promise a big toy for the first success, have it
on hand so that you can give it right away.  Don't make your child wait
until the next day.  Keep talking about that reward so that your child
can't change his mind about what his big treat is going to be!

Jean Jasinski
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