Toilet Training Made Easy

A common struggle for parents is to teach their child to use the bathroom independently. Mary Barbera in “The Verbal Behavior Approach,” discusses steps that she has found over the years to successfully train a child to use the bathroom consistently and independently.

Ensure that your child is ready to be toilet trained

It is important to make sure that the timing for training your child is right. Do not begin toilet training if your child has just been diagnosed, mands are weak, your family will be moving soon, or another big change will be happening. It is important to establish a system in which they can learn to mand first and positive behavior programs are in place. A few important questions to ask are: Does your child seem to notice or indicate when diapers are soiled? Does your child move away from you or hide to have a bowel movement? Does your child have regular bowel movements with no soiling overnight? These may be signs that your child is ready to begin training.

Before you begin toilet training

·         Begin pairing the toilet with reinforcement

o   Have the child sit on the toilet and provide reinforcement for simply sitting there. This will begin to pair the toilet with reinforcement and after pairings, the child may start to feel more comfortable with the toilet and even use it! This may happen by accident, but if it does, reinforce heavily!

·         Choose the words you will use to talk about the behaviors and make sure that everyone that the child will interact with is consistent

·         Notice any patterns in your child’s bathroom schedule

o   Keep in mind when they eat or wake up/nap because this can often affect their bathroom schedule

Daytime training

·         Make a toilet schedule that everyone is aware of. Place the child on the toilet consistently and reinforce with a treat that get exclusively for a successful bathroom trip.

·         Teach your child the separate steps that are involved in using the bathroom; for example, how to pull pants up and down, how to wash hands, and how to wipe themselves.

·         Give your child extra drinks so there is strong motivation and opportunity for bathroom trips

·         Do dry pants checks

o   Reinforce whenever their pants are dry and run a check immediately if you notice that they have had an accident

·         Use positive practice for accidents

o   Take your child quickly from the spot of the accident to the toilet and back again five to ten times in a row.

·         Keep a record of successful trips to the bathroom and accidents.

For more information regarding toilet training tips, refer to “The Verbal Behavior Approach” by Mary Barbera.

Augmentative Communication

Some children do not naturally develop language or begin to babble sounds in order to learn how to make words. With children diagnosed with Autism, this is often the case. However, these children often begin to form their own language and communicate in others ways with their parents and peers. This is called augmentative communication. In "Teaching Language to Children with Autism or other Developmental Disabilities," Sundberg and Partington discuss the ways in which children with Autism learn language and communicate with those around them.

It is important to encourage and reinforce when the child attempts to communicate with you in order to prevent the child from getting frustrated or from ceasing attempts to reach out. The four general options for selecting a form of communication for a specific child are 1) speech, 2) sign language, 3) picture pointing and exchange systems, and 4) independent writing, typing, or pointing to words.

Speech is the end goal; however, some children will need thousands of trials in order to build up their verbal repertoire. For children with strong to moderate motor imitation skills, sign language is a preferable way to learn language. Teachers can fade their prompts, they do not have to carry around a external object in order to talk to others and motor movements can actually increase language by the motion triggering the vocalization. Some advantages of the picture pointing and exchange systems are the listener does not have to have any special training in order to understand what the child is asking for, matching at first makes acquisition easier for the child and there is no shaping required. However, with this system, there is usually no improvement in speech.

It is important to build up a rapport with the child and complete an assessment in order to gauge exactly where the specific child's deficits lie. With this information in mind, a teacher can effectively choose what system to use and begin to effectively teach the child language.