Parenting on the Spectrum: How I Potty Trained My Son

Throughout the month of April, we are celebrating Autism Awareness Month. To kick off this celebration, we’re pleased to spotlight a story about parenting a child on the autism spectrum, by guest contributor, Joy Blackburn. We hope that all parents can relate to the need to use a blend of creativity, intuition and a sense of humor when figuring out what works for their children.

Joy Blackburn is the CEO of Ad Infinitum Communications and mother of Jack, an amazing young man with autism. Jack’s sudden and dramatic path to language at the age of nine was told in the 2010 documentary, “Jack and the Video Camera.” Joy is on The Arc Pikes Peak Region’s Board of Directors.

 

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How I Potty Trained My Son

By: Joy Blackburn

I have five books for potty training children on the Autism spectrum. Five. I can see them from where I’m sitting, tucked in the bookshelf with their pink and yellow and gold and blue and black-and-red spines, gathering dust. Each one was highly recommended by a professional in Jack’s orbit. Sigh.

I want my money back. All they did was make me feel like a horrible mother – first for not diligently putting my son through their methods, and second for diligently putting my son through their methods. One of them seriously had me placing Jack on the toilet for five minutes every thirty minutes! Can you imagine? (Maybe you can. Maybe you have this book too.) Jack thought I was punishing him, and he didn’t know why. It taught him to fear both the toilet and his mother, and it left him so tense that he didn’t go at all until he was napping.

Toward the end of preschool, though, I was running out of runway. If Jack was still wearing a diaper when he entered kindergarten, he’d be sent home. So I read a few more articles and bought that fifth useless book and generally dragged my feet. I didn’t have the guts to put Jack through another rigid method. Honestly, if I had put a dog through one of these methods, the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) would have been at my door.

That got me thinking…

I grew up in southern California at a time when our neighbors still kept horses and chickens. Family dogs were primarily outside animals back then. Our yappy mutts peppered the yard with poop and kept our neighbors up at night with their barking. Totally free spirits. But when I was seven, my best friend across the street got an exotic Springer Spaniel puppy that was going to live in her house! So Cocoa — that’s the dog, not my friend — had to be paper trained. The seriousness with which my friend’s whole family took this process made an impression on seven-year-old me.

The side door of their house led to a mud room off the kitchen. They closed all the doors to this room and covered the entire floor with overlapping sheets of newspaper. They started with 14 sheets, and for two weeks, Cocoa would stay in this room. On the second day, when they laid fresh paper down, they used 13 sheets, leaving a small square of floor exposed. The floor was new to Cocoa, so she avoided it when she pottied. The next day, they laid down 12 sheets, and the square of floor got bigger. And so it went. By the end of the two-week period, there was only one sheet of newspaper in the room, and that’s where Cocoa did her business. She was trained. They opened the doors and Cocoa graduated into the rest of the house. Brilliant, right? They never had to swat her, rub her nose in poop, or yell, “Bad dog” at her, like the other neighborhood families did when their dogs snuck in and pottied.

And excuse me, but how were the neighborhood dogs supposed to connect these harsh punishments with their “crimes?” Even if they made the connection that “poop” = “anger,” were they thinking humans didn’t want them to ever have a bowel movement? Why all the random hostility?

That was the problem I had with these books! They punish the child for not understanding what the parent wants from him. Jack was nonverbal. So was Cocoa. I needed to paper train my son! I would also need the number for a good carpet cleaner, but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Light bulb moment.

For decades we’ve been collecting and storing information that has nothing to do with autism. We’ve been doing this at school and work, through books, films, and conversations, and from everyday life experiences. There’s some good stuff in our brains! Stuff we can use for a particular situation with our particular kiddos. Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do, and nobody on earth knows your child better than you do!

The Method

Jack would be turning six soon. He was a big fan of computer games, juice boxes, and unusual sounds, so that’s what I used. That first week of summer break, I turned the computer on in his room and rolled the desk chair into his closet so Jack would have to stand. I lined up five juice boxes and a flavored water on the desk. Under the desk, I laid a towel and — the magic ingredient — a large, metal bowl.

After breakfast, I dressed Jack in his favorite shirt. Only the shirt. I left him to play his computer games while I straightened up the room and cleaned his fish tank. Yeah, I was hovering, but I needed to see how things went.

The first time he peed, he was so involved in the game that he had little attention to spare for the “ringing” of the metal bowl. He glanced down briefly at the end, but that was it. I removed the bowl, dumped it and replaced it under the desk.

The second time the bowl began ringing, Jack looked down right away. He stopped playing to watch as the bowl filled. When he was finished, he looked at me to see if I was going to remove the bowl again for dumping. He was fast with patterns, that little man.

The third time, he looked for the bowl before he began peeing. That’s when I knew this was going to work! I would start “removing newspapers” tomorrow.

Day Two: We had breakfast, I dressed Jack in just a shirt, and I stood him in front of the computer again. But this time I put the towel and bowl on the floor beside him to his left. He struggled to get his stream into the bowl the first couple of times, but then he had it. Excellent.

Day Three: I placed the towel and bowl to his left again, but now it was two steps away from where he stood. My fear at this point was that he’d pull the bowl closer to his desk for convenience. But he didn’t. I think it’s because the bowl was parked on the towel. The towel created a kind of “bowl station” that Jack saw as fixed in place, even though the station itself was moving from one day to the next.

But consider what he now taught himself to do without any direction, coercion or punishment: 1) Recognize the need to pee. 2) Stop what he was doing to address it and, 3) Walk to a specific place to do it.

This crazy method was working!

Day Four: I placed the towel and bowl four steps away from him, and just outside his bathroom door.

Day Five: The bowl was now on the other side of the bathroom door. The threshold might have caused Jack to stop and view the “bathroom bowl” as something different than the “bedroom bowl,” so I turned the towel lengthwise and let about six inches of it extend invitingly into the bedroom. Bingo.

Day Six: The towel and bowl were placed on the floor directly in front of the toilet.

Day Seven: Today the bowl was placed on top of the toilet seat. The towel was no longer being used, but I didn’t want it to be suddenly gone since I was already throwing Jack a curve with the change in the bowl’s level. I dropped the towel down between the toilet and the wall where he could easily see it, but where it seemed “out of commission.” The experiment went off without a hitch.

Day Eight: Drum roll, please! I removed the towel and turned the bowl sideways so it could fit down in that same space between the wall and the toilet. The bowl was now “out of commission.” Jack walked in to find it, and as he stood there wondering if he should pick it up, he began peeing into the toilet. It was a deeper sound than what he got from the bowl and it caught his attention immediately. He was hooked.

I left him pant-less for another day. On Day Ten I dressed him in loose underwear. On Day Twelve, I added pull-on shorts. And that was it! No tears, no tantrums, and no emotional scars — for either of us.

Good dog! Er … boy!