What I Did to Successfully Potty Train Adrian

I’m trying to give someone advice on a board on how to potty train her child who has an ASD and I keep thinking of new things to tell her so I want to just organize all of my thoughts here so I can hopefully be a help to her and other mom’s of special needs kids.

The first thing we did was buy him a little potty and put it in a convenient place. Yes it may not be the cutest thing to have a potty in your living room but it has to be convenient for them and sometimes right next to the big potty or even trying to train them on the big potty can be very intimidating. Plus in the first week or so you are going to be doing a lot of rushing them over to the potty to avoid accidents. So we just put the potty in the living room in a corner, no stressing him out about it, no making him sit on it….it was just there!

Eventually he explored the potty, took it apart and sat on in with a diaper on here and there. Every now and then we would point to the potty and say “Potty!” and show him the sign. The sign for potty is the alphabet letter “T” and you shake it. If you don’t know the sign for “T” you can check out http://www.aslpro.com and you can look it up and see someone on video do the sign for you. It’s an awesome site. If your child is nonverbal or limited verbally they have to have a way to let you know that they need to go potty. You can also use PECS (picture exchange communication system) if you just google it I’m sure you can find potty pictures but I am much more fond of signing. It’s just more convenient for us.

After he was aquainted with the potty we would have him sit on it and tell him that, “that is where pee and poop goes” Eventually we ditched the diapers except when he went to school and when we went shopping or to dinner (where an accident would be especially inconvenient) We let him run around naked. We had a day or two of pee and poop accidents but as soon as he would have an accident we would tell him while pointing to the “accident” “that goes in the potty” and sign potty while you say “potty”

When you talk to any child, not just one with autism it’s important to get down to their level and look them in the eye so we would get down and tell him “that goes in the potty” and then we would place him on the potty.

I was very scared about training Adrian. I didn’t know how it was ever going to happen but it really wasn’t bad at all! He picked up on it really quickly and we have almost no accidents now. We have a freak accident here and there but its usually either at school or if we are out somewhere.

I think it’s just important to not get frustrated and to follow your child’s lead. If they aren’t ready to be trained…don’t train them yet! Of course you can try to steer them in the direction of being ready/interested in the potty but you can’t make them go! Good luck!

Thought I should add…this is my old post describing how we transitioned him from the baby potty to the big potty. Here is content from that post:

Adrian is doing great on the potty training. He’s going in the big potty now! No more baby potty to empty out. The transition was really easy, I put his baby potty right next to the big potty in the bathroom (I had it in the corner of the living room so that when we first started training him we could run him to the potty if he started to go) and I showed him where it was one morning and he just started using the big potty instead. He flushes and everything. One funny thing he does is after he goes pee pee he rips off a piece of toilet paper and throws it in the toilet and then flushes it. He’s starting to get better about wearing clothes more often so that’s good news too. Now we just need to train him when we aren’t in the house, he did go in Grandma’s potty once.

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