Toilet Training the 'Special' Kid

(Master J aged 3 months - February 1999)

I remember, not so long ago, having three children in nappies. That's three children in disposable nappies. Even with just the mid-range brands, we were spending around $50 a week minimum.

Now some might examine this and wonder why on earth we had three children in nappies at the same time. We didn't have triplets, and our children aren't abnormally close in age (no 'Irish twins' in our family!) Master J was 3yrs, 1mo when his sister was born, and Boofah was sandwiched somewhere in between.

The difference in our situation was that Master J is disabled and didn't toilet train until the age of 6. Yes, you read that right. The problem is quite common amongst the disability community, but judging by the reactions we got during this timeframe, you'd have thought the poor boy was twelve years old and not trained out of sheer laziness on our part. There's an old saying in regards to toilet training, often directed toward despairing parents, fearful their angel child will never toilet train - "How many twenty-one year olds do you see in nappies?" It's meant to reassure them that eventually, every kid trains.

Well, for the longest time, we honestly thought our child was going to be that grown man in adult diapers. Families living on the autistic spectrum and other families with disabled children will probably understand when I say that toilet training Master J was just about the only thing we thought of between the ages of 3 (at diagnosis) and 6. We had actually started training the summer he turned 2, right about the time we noticed something was 'off' - he wasn't talking at the time. So all in all, we trained for FOUR YEARS.

Now, think about that for a moment. Four years is a university degree. Four years is from one Olympic Games to the next. Four years is one year longer than it took to produce my little monkeys in the first place. From the time Miss Moo was born until Master J finally trained spanned three full years. For me, that entire period has morphed into one, long, retrospective Twilight Zone episode. I changed one nappy, turned around to dispose of it, and the next child needed changing. I shudder to think (now) of the landfill this caused but in all honesty, some things are worth it to preserve one's sanity, and disposable nappies were my lifeline. These were also the Years of Diagnosis and it was hard enough to wade through the wet cement that was my life during that period as it was.

It was actually Boofah who trained first. About 18 months later, Miss Moo was nearing the end of her own training, when just about overnight, Master J 'got it'.

Just to paint a picture - this was a child who we'd put on the toilet every day since he turned two years old. Throughout his kindergarten (preschool) year, his support worker had scheduled one, sometimes two, toilet trips for each kindy session. That's roughly 200 opportunities for him to produce something on the toilet, and he never did - and these were just the half days he was at kindergarten! When he started primary school at age 5, he was not toilet trained. Even though the school he was enrolled in had a special ed class, they'd never had a non-trained child before. They actually had to section off a part of the female staff toilet and bring in a height-adjustable doctor's bed. Now that's something to share with the other Mums in the playground! He showed no signs of understanding what the toilet was for, but we kept going. Every single day. Something like 1500 separate trips to the toilet (and probably more) over the four years it took him to train. Toilet training a regular kid doesn't even come close to the effort it takes to train a kid like Master J.

We'd just broken for the third term holidays in that first year at school, and like we had hundreds of times before, we just decided to bite the bullet and keep him in underwear as much as possible while we were at home. Our carpets were ruined anyway, and we'd seen so much pee and poop it simply didn't register anymore, LOL. There was nothing to lose.

We still can't figure out what was different that time. He went cold turkey with the daytime nappies and only needed the night nappies for a week, and that's it. After four years of desperation, tears of frustration, and thousands of bribes, one week and a packet of underwear was all it took. The best way we can describe it is simply that his brain finally matured enough to match his body signals. Maybe before this, he was getting the signals but simply had no idea how to process them (and this sort of ties in with his early sensory issues). His brain just needed a bit of extra time to catch up.

But I can still remember the day he did his first wee on the potty. Oh my gosh, I went crazy! I actually rang up his old support worker - whom he hadn't worked with for over a year at that point, - and shared the good news. She was as excited as we were. For those amongst us who had 'easy trainers' or 'on par' kids, this might seem a little over the top. But I count Master J's eventual triumph over toilet training as one of my parenting highlights :) And I won't even tell you how thrilled we were to see the first poop! LOL.

Fast forward several years and alot of the issues we had with Master J in the beginning have diminished. He had quite a severe speech delay around the time of diagnosis (one of the more common factors in an autism diagnosis) and he now has functional speech. A lot of the initial behavioural issues have evaporated (though we still have our moments, LOL). And life in general has mellowed - our acceptance of who he is and more importantly how he is, has settled into a comfortable place.

But tonight, as I was mopping the wall - yes, the wall - after one of his wayward-half-asleep-and-not-concentrating toilet trips, I only had to think back to what it was like just two-and-a-half years ago, when I was desperate and crying myself to sleep over images of diaper-wearing teenagers, and I almost felt grateful to be cleaning wee off the wall.

Almost. LOL.

Cheers,
Lizzie