Yet another toilet training issue.

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You may need to do a half-dose of the miralax for several days, to get him thoroughly cleaned out and regular. Consult your pediatrician for how much and how long.

When my DS7 was on a medication that caused chronic constipation, his doctor had us give him 2 or 3 eight ounce glasses of orange juice with miralax a day until he passed stool. Then we were to experiment and reduce it, using our judgement, and aiming for a stool every day that was somewhat solid, not runny or like diarrhea. He ended up on a maintance dose of 4 oz per day until we reduced the dose of the medication causing the issue. Even on the low dose, the poop was always that disgusting peanut butter stuff.

I wonder if he decided that he doesn't want to have a BM on the toilet because water splashed up on him or something while he was going. I guess it doesn't explain why he stopped going all together, though.

My almost 4 year old won't go on the potty at all and it's making me crazy. I don't think she's ASD, but she does have sensory issues.


BTW, I have heard of typical kids who hold their BM's when they are being potty trained, too. They just get anxious for whatever reason and want to control that.

"We explained that the toy was going to go away if he used a pull-up, and this caused a lot of shrieking hysteria until he apparently resigned himself to the situation and grabbed a pull-up. Away went the toy, and he responded with a shrug."

Not a tactic I would recommend. In many ways, I've found that the exact opposite of what you think will work, frequently works with autistic kids. I have three.

Toilet training took a very long time for the eldest, somewhat shorter for the next, and less for the next. The key was NEVER making a big deal out of it. We quit using rewards, and even quit making a big deal out of it when there were successes. Oddly, the best tactic we discovered was to just teach them how, and wait. Our middle son wet the bed almost nightly until he was fourteen. He only recently stopped.

My experience has taught me that making a big deal out of anything very often backfires, whether it's in a negative OR a positive way. Rewards work only short term, then they don't work anymore. Letting them all be and develop at their own rates, without any complaints, or too much praise, seems to be building a better sense of self reliance and self pride. Now, they don't do things because it pleases us. They do them because they actually want to, because they feel better about themselves when they do.

My 3 are exactly 18 months apart. All three of them were toilet trained at just about the same time, with the only exception being the bedwetting.

The stuff that worked fine with his (also on the spectrum) older brother just DOESN'T with him, and I think that's what throws us. That, and the fact that things that are great one day are awful the next.

Bathing, for example. He refused to take a bath for the longest time, and we let it go -- seemed like a sensory issue. And then we convinced him to give it a shot, so he could play with some new bath toys that we got for his brother, and he LOVED it. To the point of sobbing when bath time was over, and he looked like a pink raisin.

And then a few weeks later, he decided that he didn't like baths again. There was no apparent trauma, no reason that we could see. But that was it; he now officially hates baths.

I just can't talk to him -- another difference from his brother, who was fairly articulate at this age. Any questions about his motivations or emotions are met with silence, or "Because", or "I don't know." Or the ever-popular "No, thanks."

Same thing with what he did at school, or playing. If I ask him what he did at school, or what kind of pretend game he's playing, he tells me to "Be quiet!" or "Leave me alone!" I love hearing his elaborate pretend sessions, but I have to pretend to be asleep...if he even notices me watching, he shuts down.

(Mind you, he WILL go over to a total stranger and inform them that he got a Happy Meal for pooping in his pull-up.)

That's the big thing with the potty regression...I have no idea what the issue is, and I just can't talk to him about it.

Welcome to our quirky world



And you may never know. I'll bet my life you'll see this kind of "inexplicable" switcharoo in many other areas of his life too. Wait until he's in school.

None of my sons went through anything the same way. There are some similarities, but each one of them is on his own time scale, almost never knows why he can do something one day, but not the next. You can't go by past performance. To do so only causes us to insist they can do things that maybe they really can't right now...

And on and on.

Welcome to autism. It's a different world. Forget everything you thought you knew. Accept and get to know your child. He's in there. You just have to sit back and watch for a while.

Then again, I'm on the spectrum too, so maybe that gives me an advantage. I can recognize a lot of what goes on in my kids from my own childhood.

It's been a good couple months now, and still no progress. Still urinating in the toilet without a hint of complaint, still wearing underwear all day long, still putting on a pull-up whenever he needs to poop.

Any suggestion of using the toilet for the latter activity is met with a very dispassionate "No." If we press the issue, he gets upset...and we, not wanting another week of constipation, back right off. Still no explanation as to why not, beyond "I don't want to." And again, he gets REALLY upset if we ask him to explain.

(This lack of communication is his most frustrating trait; the very idea of talking about his thoughts is genuinely upsetting to him. Even asking him his favorite color is enough to make him shut us out.)

Right now, he's in morning-only headstart, so it's not an issue. He wears underwear to school, and goes after he gets home. In the fall, he's going into kindergarten. We kinda need him to be fully toilet-trained by then.

He's looking forward to kindergarten, not least because he'll be walking to school with his big brother. I have explained, gently, that he's going to need to use the toilet when he goes to Kindergarten. He's responded with a calm "I know."

Do I just take him at his word? Finding out on the first day of school that he intends to go on as he has would not be fun for anyone. Should we try and press the issue over the summer? If so, how, without making things worse when he stubborns up on us?

My daughter started going to school only part-time. At first she liked it that way, but then she realized the rest of the kids stayed the whole day and she wanted to stay too. She was very resistant to potty training at that time and I told her that she could only go to school all day if she got out of pull-ups and in to panties. She took off her pull-up when she got home, requested panties, and has been using the toilet ever since.

The point of my story is that it may very well be that he might just start doing it when he starts kindergarten.