Toilet training and self-awareness questions

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It occurred to me to check: do you understand the concept of differential reinforcement? Often parents get reinforcement, but the concept of a differential is also important when doing complex trainings like this. So just in case:

Differential reinforcement reflects the fact that we often have shifting goals for children. Our goals today become our natural expectations tomorrow. As a result, we need to be constantly assessing where the child is in terms of what tasks are difficult or easy for him/her, and adjusting our reinforcement to reflect that. If someone who is out of shape set a goal and ran a 5k race, it may be reasonable for all their friends to celebrate and throw a big party for them (lots of reinforcement for meeting a difficult goal). If a person who often trains for and runs marathons runs a 5k race, a big party may be a bit over-blown (too much reinforcement, since the goal was not difficult). We do the same for children; whatever is easy today may get reinforced in small ways, with small amounts of time with preferred items, small amounts of food, few tokens (in a token economy system) or mild praise (a simple and not too enthusiastic "good job" or "thanks"). If something is hard, it gets a lot of reinforcement; enough to make the child truly excited and joyful. That drives the child to try to replicate that difficult task, and as they start to master it and that becomes more common-place, we turn the reinforcement down, and start teaching something tougher and expecting slightly more.

In the case of potty training our goal may start as "pee on the toilet", then "request (with prompting) to pee on the toilet", then "request, without prompting to pee on the toilet", then "go 2 hours without wetting yourself by requesting when you have to go" then "go 1 day without wetting yourself" etc. So as that goalpost moves, we change our reinforcement for each specific behavior. Once your child can independently request to go on the toilet, we're reinforcing that and peeing by itself becomes less impressive. Once he requests consistently, then our expectations go up again, and we may not actually reinforce the peeing part at all, while only reinforcing the requests a little bit, and reinforcing periods of having dry pants a lot.

So the basic idea is to have a sense of what our goals are in each moment and what the child is capable of, and make sure that his rewards are scaled so that when he is doing something new and difficult, he's rewarded accordingly, and when he's doing something easy, he's rewarded less...that way we can help to keep him always oriented towards developing new skills. Parents tend to do this stuff naturally to some extent, since people get genuinely excited when someone achieves something new and difficult. However, when you learn a reinforcement system, you can feel like you have to follow it like a robot, and this dynamic element can go by the wayside. Teaching has to stay a dynamic process that moves with the child and differential reinforcement helps to achieve that.

I am not trying to muddy the waters, but I have a question about this. When you move the goal posts, how do you make sure the child sees it as fair? The reason I ask is that my parents did this particular thing a lot, and as a child I deeply resented it. I was been being rewarded for something and then once they were sure I wasn't going to regress, "poof" the reward went away. Eventually I spoke up about my feelings and my parents explained what they were doing. I thought they were being manipulative and unfair. As an adult I understand not wanting to continually reward something that no longer takes effort, but as a child...not so much.

We are at a point where more issues are a function of lagging skills. Sometimes we use reinforcers to tip the scales to get our son to persevere in cases when we think he has a good chance of succeeding if he can muster the courage. All incentive systems are for a limited time: the conditions are clear and an expiration date is out in the open. It still bothered me as an adult enough to make sure I did not do a bait and switch. A limited-time opportunity seems fairer to me, somehow.

If you have a young child like the OP does, how does it not look like bait and switch?

(Sorry, if this is a hijack, I just worry that it is important for the OP to maintain trust with her child--and I thought as an autistic person I should put this line of thinking out there in case this is not a thing for NT kids.)

Reinforcement fading shouldn't be abrupt...that's when the child is shocked like that and it feels like a bait and switch. The amount of reward for what is now easy slowly lessens until it goes away (when the difficulty is trivial). So for example, I'm sure there was a time that my mom praised me heavily for tying my shoes. I think it would be odd if she even noticed me doing that as an adult. There was an intermediary period there where tying my shoes became gradually less impressive until it was just expected.

It should be gradual, and ideally the fading of the reinforcer should coincide with the changing of difficulty for the child. This is especially important when we're trying to shape up a complex behavior because when we start, we'll take a half-correct attempt by a child and reinforce that, but we don't want the child to settle there (or they'll never learn the more complex skill). Once the child is very consistent with a skill, and able to complete it correctly consistently with no reminders, then we can start fading out the reinforcement and start teaching the new skills.

You're right to point out that this can be frustrating, and it's where there is a bit of an art to the technique...You have to understand the person you're working with and stick with goals that are at that level where they are being challenged but not frustrated: where they can be effort-fully learning, but not being exhausted (by doing too much difficult work), overwhelmed (by tasks that are too difficult), or bored (by trivial work). That can be very challenging to get right, especially with a non-verbal child.

-There is consistency here, and in fact it's not a bait and switch, you just have to shift your thinking a bit. We're not just rewarding success, we're rewarding effort. Since the amount of effort changes as we learn, the rewards shift to match that.

@hismom,
does he understand symbols?
the toilet of mine has got a special customised PECS chart on the wall showing the very basic stages of how to go to the toilet,am sat down on the toilet by family/staff and stood by for a while,they go through each step if have missed any and it eventualy helps though am incontinent and use a nappy at all other times.
am 'lucky' in that bowel has always been severely constipated and never rushes out,even when have taken the laxido,its only ever rushed out when theres been a build up/impaction or when have been given picolax.

as for the other topic,its interesting as am still completely unable to recognise self in the mirror and to a much lesser degree;photos-am able to relate self to them slightly when recognising the items in the picture.

Hi KOR,

No, he does not yet understand symbols. This has made using PECS with him very hard. He does not yet get the concept of pictures, even pictures of real objects and not cartoons or line drawings.

I took a picture of our toilet, the sink, and the towel on the rack to create a schedule for him. I am hoping that, by constant repetitions, he will eventually understand the process and learn to identify symbols. Do you have any advise for me on how to teach him to identify objects in the picture and match them to real-life objects ?

Today has been really hard on me. He had multiple pee accidents and one more poop accidents. I am not overly superstitious but I do hope that I hadn't celebrated too early that he was "half toilet trained"

I wonder if you could get a little doll-house sized toilet, sink, and towel rack, and start with a schedule made of physical objects rather than pictures? The fancy ones that middle-aged ladies use to make model houses, that look like the real thing. Of course, then you might run into problems because they don't look like exact miniatures of your real toilet...

HisMom, are services only available to you through the school district? It seems like Regional Services (or whatever it is called in your area) should be funding ABA to help you out with some of these things...

^^I was thinking the same thing. If he is completely non-communicative, basic communication training may be a more crucial first goal. You may want to even switch back to pull-ups and try again once you have at least a few words. If he can't communicate or go to the bathroom completely independently, he won't be able to self-monitor. Without him self-monitoring you're going to have a lot of accidents, unless you spend half the day in the bathroom. That's a nearly impossible expectation to set for yourselves and him, and it'll just lead to him hating the bathroom. You are really in the situation where you need some individually tailored professional help, so I'd focus on getting that if at all possible (it should be available for free, given the situation).