bountifulplate

Even though Dominic is over nine years old, he just recently got 100% potty trained. What a long, difficult and stressful road that was for all of us in this house.  How many of you out there with typically developing children had a difficult time with the potty training? Did it take a few days, weeks, months? When you have a child with Autism, it can be a totally different experience and may take much, much longer. Dominic doesn't have any physical disabilities that would prevent him from being trained, so we knew he was capable of it.  In the past, whenever I would ask Dominic about using the potty, his response was always a resounding, "no!"   He was perfectly content to be sitting in a soiled diaper or a Pull-Up for hours.  Believe me, I got out tons of books from the library, spent hours on the computer researching the subject and asked parents of special needs children how they accomplished the toileting - nothing was helping.  I knew that him be...

One thing that kids teach you is patience.  When they are babies and cry, you have to try and figure out why they are crying.  Since babies can't tell you why they are crying, you have to try and guess. Are they wet, need a hug, want a bottle, to be nursed?  A lot of times you can tell by the type of cry what they want.  As they get older and learn to walk, you have to be patient as they toddle, then fall, toddle then fall, until one day they walk or run right towards you.  As they get even older (tweens and teens), if you ask them how their day went and they say, "fine" you have to be patient and hopefully they will REALLY tell you what happened in their day.  When you are a parent of a special needs child, you really learn the meaning of the word "patient."  Milestones are much, much harder to achieve and sometimes they never are. Right now, we are dealing with an issue with Dominic that is really testing our patience. After months of really hard wor...

Mention potty training to a parent who has been through it or is currently in the midst of it and I'm sure you will hear many stories and opinions. My mom told me once she had to hand me over to a neighbor to be trained. Guess I was a little stubborn, huh??  While Dominic has made progress in a lot of areas, the potty training has proved to be much, much slower than we anticipated.  There seemed for years to be a disconnect between him knowing where to do the #1 and #2 and actually having him doing it.  I would ask him "why" he didn't want to do it, but he really couldn't fully verbalize his reasons. Anytime we even attempted to train him in the past, he was super anxious and stressed, so we kept putting it off.  Believe me, I have read just about every book ever published about potty training, both for typically developing children and ones with special needs.  There was no physical reason why he couldn't do it, so it made it all the more frustrating. With mo...