Teen will not change bathroom routine--help!!

Post Reply New Topic

OMG--this is excellent. I had no idea this sort of thing existed. I will get this--I've already found it on Amazon. My son is very heavy and his being overweight just adds another layer of trouble, so this could really work. THANK YOU.

To the OP: I know, btw, there are still issues like the hair washing to discuss, but that I'd set aside until you've made progress on the wiping. One thing at a time.

I will note that learning how to wash hair properly is something many kids have a hard time with it. It isn't just AS kids. Figuring out the right amount of shampoo, how to get it properly through the hair, et al, is not nearly as simple as it sounds. It is only recently that my ten year old NT daughter stopped needing my help to get her long hair properly cleaned, conditioned, and combed through. But she still calls out for me to do it ... because once she started doing it herself, she discovered she missed that 10 minutes of attention from mommy. That was about the same time I started working more hours, so it was a way to steal back some time. See what I mentioned potential hidden needs, in my first post? Knowing that, I can make an alternate promise instead: "if you do it yourself tonight, maybe there will be a little time for me to do your nails."

My son didn't get the hair washing right until he was 13. Don't know if that was AS or "boy." Just know that we saw a lot of gross hair, to the point where I would insist that he had to let me re-wash it in a sink (thankfully, yes, there is an easy and appropriate way for mom to wash an older boy's hair).

You are right about the attention, for sure. I know I should have done more to resolve the wiping problem,but I've been put off by my son's angry scream-outs if I even suggest that he do it. I recently contacted an adolescent psychiatrist about his anger issues and when I described the wiping, the psych was horrified, suggesting that he was psychotic, and suggesting a bunch of assessments. But my son's aspergers diagnosis, which he's had (by a different doctor) for 4 years did not even get any consideration. I just know in my gut that he is not psychotic--he is just afraid of touching poo, very rigid in his habits, and he has a temper.

Trust your gut. I've read enough on these boards to know that this situation isn't as far out there as it sounds.

But it is time to solve it.

I hope Louise18's idea saves the day for you.

Louise18 definitely gets the gold star today. For one brilliant idea and also for the answer on life skill delays that I wish I'd given instead of the first few "books" I wrote

Thank you to everyone for the generally non-judgmental feedback. When I have described these problems to people in the medical profession, especially the adolescent psychiatrists in the "enlightened"town of Berkeley, California, I get some pretty negative reactions. The worst part is his age and my gender--as no 15 year old boy would ever want to show his butt to his mom. OK, I do get it. He has gone through puberty. It is not "normal" to want to rely on his mom. Its a Freudian nightmare. My son has above-average intelligence but seems under-age emotionally in some areas, rather naive, socially awkward for sure. He is embarassed and enraged when he finds out that I have talked to nhis pediatrician about this. But I don't like the way people just judge him, as if he is a freak of some kind. I don't feel like I can trust them, or rely on their diagnosis. His Aspergers, and the deficits that he has because of the Aspergers, and his OCD, have to be looked at together. The fact that his motor skills, his size and inability to reach his butt easily, has to be factored into it.

I hope I'm not butting in here but I felt I had something relevant to add. My mom used to wash my hair in the kitchen sink till I was 12-13 or so. I used to lie down on the counter so she could do it. And I never questioned it, that was just how things were for me. And she only did it once a week, so, yeah, my hair did get gross and the other kids at school noticed.

Anyway one day my dad said, "Isn't he too old for that?" so from that day on I started taking showers (I used to do little-kid style baths before that) and never had any hair issues after that.

I am one of those guys who doesn't know if he is AS or not, but as a kid I am fairly certain I would have qualified for a diagnosis, if they had them back then. Probably not now, though.

I think this relates to the whole maturity thing Chronos was talking about. If my mom had had me start taking showers earlier, I could've avoided the nightmare of getting teased at school for having gross hair.

I don't know why she did it. Never asked and don't plan to. Maybe she felt that I was still "her baby." *shrug*

My apologies, I guess I did butt in.

My intention was to empathize with the op and make it clear that they aren't the only one one the board with this issue and needing help. In addition, because it is SO sensitive of an issue, i thought it important to point out when it was being addressed in an insensitive way.

It wasn't so much that I was asking for help (although I realize I did) more to say that instead of telling us (people with this issue) that we are bad parents, to offer real suggestions.

My son has been taking showers since he was 11 or so, on his own. It was a natural change with the start of middle school, having a new schedule, and suddenly needing deodorant et al. But if he used shampoo he wouldn't use enough, and most of the time he simply forgot. We did signs, we did the "dad walking in and reminding" thing. But it wasn't getting done. The rewash in the sink, me making him let me do it, broke the pattern. He didn't like thinking the grooming was done only to find I didn't consider it done well enough, and demand a do over (he got two or three days to get it right on his own, lots of warning). For us, this was an enforcer of the message, "learn to do it yourself," but I can see where another child may see it as a fall back, and maybe even a nice one.

In my experience, putting a child in the shower doesn't automatically mean they'll figure out how to wash their hair.

I think we also need to distinguish between child led and parent led. Your mom had never let you try it a different way - that is parent led. All parents have to be careful about that, that they are not holding their kids back simply by not asking, suggesting, or allowing. It is easy to fall into: we want to protect our kids, and, well, not changing is always easier than changing. I thought Chronos, however, was addressing child led delay, where the parent believes from clues received from the child that he isn't ready. I think the debate may come from Chronos not really buying into that concept, maybe because he finds it too flawed for parents to rely on, especially with AS kids, ie he believes that parents will assume because of the diagnosis that their kids can't do something, when they can, or maybe misunderstand the signals from the kids because of the AS v. NT gap. I am really confident that I can read my son, however, I think most parents can if they wish to, as long as they approach the issue devoid of all assumption.

I do wonder why your mom never thought of changing it ... I guess, well, she just didn't. How was it done in her home growing up?

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 30 Jul 2011, 3:23 pm, edited 5 times in total.

I'm fairly certain that some of my son's behavior relates to his experiences at middle school, where "nasty" and "gross" and "dirty" were related to the human body. Based on what my son has told me and my own observation of kids at that school, some kids masturbate in the bathrooms, grab each other and simulate sex, reach their hands into their pants when they are wearing low,oversized "gangsta" clothing, and generally talk about sex as if its a "nasty" thing. Lots of stuff like this every single day. About 70 percent of this school is this type of kid, usually minority students from poor households. I have talked to the principal repeatedly about this stuff, and he always is sympathetic, but nothing ever changes.

I have complained to lots of people and sometimes they sympathize. Other times I am accused of being a racist. That is sad, given that I was one of the first precinct captains in Berkeley on the 2008 Obama campaign!!

My son "graduated" from that school 2 years ago, but because our limited finances, he is still in the public school system, and now is in "independent study" at the high school, which is removed from the general population of kids.

This is the reality of the Berkeley California public schools, where they pay a huge amount of lip service to anti-bullying and "equality" but the schools are very unsafe. Berkeley High has 3,000 kids and guns are confiscated on campus on a regular basis. The culture of tweens, sex talk and violence is almost institutionalized. I have an NT daughter who will go to the same middle school that my son went to this fall, but luckiy she will have friends to surround her and protect her, I HOPE. By the time she gets to high school we will get her into a private or parochial high school somehow. She will be able to test into one, which my son would not.

I will tell you a few reasons why lists matter. I have another disorder as well, and this disorder shares some symptoms in common with another disorder though the two disorders have fairly different biophysiological mechanism and different treatment and prognosis implications. There was a time when they could not distinguish between these two disorders until the person was into their 3rd decade of life, as the latter disorder was more severe and potentially resulted in rapid systemic deterioration. Because of this, the lesser disorder was categorized with a diagnostic code that made it a subset of the more severe disorder. This had severe health insurance implications, making those with the lesser disorder uninsurable or required to pay extremely high insurance premiums to cover a risk they did not actually have.

It also prevented individuals with the lesser disorder from effectively managing their symptoms and distinguishing what symptoms were a manifestation of the disorder and what warranted further investigation. Many routine medications were contraindicated in the more severe disorder, and so what would have otherwise been a short procedure or medical treatment turned into drawn out, expensive ordeals for those with the lesser disorder when this was actually not necessary.

Even after the advent of genetic testing which was able to determine to resolve the two disorders early in life, and determine they had entirely different genetic mechanisms, health insurance providers were still hesitant to insure those with the lesser disorder at
reasonable prices and a large amount of lobbying had to be done to have the lesser disorder recategorized to convince the health insurance companies to insure individuals with it at appropriate rates.

It is important not to throw things in the same basic just because they have superficial similarities. Frequently, it's the dissimilarities that are more important. When you group things based on similarities only, you introduce elements of complications that arise from erroneous assumptions.

Significant life skills delays, just like significant language delays, have profound neurological and developmental implications. When you toss those individuals in the same basket with those with adequate life skills (or the potential for), and adequate to superior language skills, you end up short changing both groups. One because it ultimately de-emphasizes weaknesses that need to be addressed (you will wrangle a lot more for resources if the declaration of need is weak or diluted in the literature), and the other because it produces false perceptions that they must deal with. People with AS already have to deal with false perceptions which aren't based on anything but ignorance, even by well meaning family members.

The diagnostic criteria for AS specifies that individuals with AS have no non-social life skills impairment and that is why I have a diagnosis of AS and not PDD-NOS. I do not wish to be lumped under diagnostic criteria that says otherwise as this could have testified fallacies of me which would have only served to inhibit me, both in my development as a child and my life as an adult, as the perception that I may have difficulty with life skills would surely make me far less desirable to an employer when I disclose, or could even result in situations where I am deemed an unfit guardian or rob me of my independence.

There are ramifications that lack of resources can have on children, but there are also profound ramifications that misclassifications can have on adults and that needs to be considered.

The DSM-IV is not perfect but it makes certain distinctions for a reason.



Most of the incidents of workplace "meltdowns" I have heard of were from younger individuals. If you wished to teach your son things other than tying his shoes then that was your prerogative. Though I don't know if he actually did, it would not be unusual for your son to have difficulty in tying his shoes because those with AS frequently also have NVLD. This would not count as a life skills delay because though the ultimate result impacts one ability to perform a life skill, the cause is due to damage or abnormalities in the region of the brain that controls moto-spatial abilities and is more similar in nature to the movement and coordination issues seen in stroke victims, those with CP and so on. It's not related to immaturity of executive function.



I would have to agree with your son that the world does have it's priorities messed up. I think that we emphasize different things is well illustrated by your last paragraph.

Hygiene issues in children with AS are not actually life skills delays. It's not a matter of can't. They have hygiene issues because hygiene is usually not high on the list of priorities. It's generally seen as an nuisance and an interruption in their day to bathe. A study was done not too long ago and found that in western society (westerners and those in industrialized nations bathe with a frequency which is anomalous in the context of human history), a strong motivator for people to bathe was fear of social stigma. Children with AS generally don't have much of a conscious concept of this. A child with AS could sit there dirty and smelly to the rest of the world and not be bothered by it. If left entirely to their own resources, they will eventually break down and bathe when the discomfort of their situation overcomes the stress of the transition and any sensory issues that might be involved in the process of bathing.

You should, of course, bother your child to bathe, until they are 16. Mind you, I said bother, not get in there and help them.

I guess this thread has totally deviated from the OPs question now. Get any thing from all this Pekkla?

Well, my impression was that Chronos was talking about parent-led, based on the info that the OP gave about her son at the time.

As for how this was done when my mom was a kid, I have no idea. I only remembered my own circumstance because hair-washing came up in this thread. I'd totally forgotten about it.

Pekkla, sorry for the diversion. Is it, um, at least kind of interesting?

Wreck-Gar, if a child is refusing to acquire a skill, and asking mom to do it, isn't that child led?

Chronos, I really don't think the DSM are talking about "life skills" when they refer to developmental delays. The pediatrician stopped asking about "how many words does your child say?" "can he walk?" etc. years ago. Now it's, "what books do you like to read?" but not "can you ride a bicycle?" The kinds of delays discussed on this board for kids tend to be ones the doctors aren't even asking about on a normal basis, so I don't think they are part of the DSM. And lets get blunt - I don't have the bandwidth to study, remember or care about DSM's. You aren't going to force me into it, because it's not how I think, and it's not a level of detail I can hold because my memory for that stuff is really poor (despite an officially gifted IQ) and almost nothing in life ever perfectly fits any checklist, so you're always left figuring it by instinct and luck, anyway. Even if I did want to rely on them, they would not ever be a complete solution by themselves; I'd STILL have to pay attention to and know my unique child, to figure out what is best. And the funny thing ... My son is diagnosed AS because I needed that label to get him an IEP. I needed an IEP to get him help with a writing co-morbid. It was all driven by something NOT on the AS DSM, not even officially part of the AS, to start with. That AS has proven to fit is practically little more than an interesting side effect. A lucky one that solved all sorts of questions I hadn't thought to ask yet when I went out looking for a writing issue solution, but still a side effect.

By elementary school, "development" is heavily integrated with social skills that I don't know how one could separate it. Hygiene, self care, independence all have a social component; the standards haven't exactly been set since the dawn of time; they change as people change.

Parenting is driven by needs. See need, solve it. Someone else can debate what the DSM mean, all I want is someone to hand me a viable solution, and THAT isn't written on the list. THAT may, or may not, change if you're splitting hairs between PDD-NOS and AS (both of which are ASD's), etc. Within the broad group of people attracted to this forum I have found all sorts of unsual and important solutions, as have many families all across the ASD spectrum. Yes, some distinctions are crucial - is an attention problem ADD or sensory? Others aren't, and the one you want to hang on (PDD-NOS v. AS) doesn't seem to me to matter much as far as parenting decisions go. You've STILL got to look first to your unique child, and either way you're only looking at medical intervention for co-morbids, not the ASD. Grab the one that will get your child what your child needs. Figure out what your child needs by a combination of science and knowing your child. Knowing your child is still primary; it has to be.

I think he meant in this case that the parent should refuse to do it. I don't know. I think i will bow out of this discussion now...this is really not my area of expertise, my son is not even toilet trained yet! But he is ASD, not AS.

You really should not have talked to his paediatrician about this without his consent. He will feel the horror of that much more deeply than a NT child will. You need to respect his boundaries about privacy as well as encouraging him to develop normal ones. I would suggest changing doctors, and encouraging him to choose who he wants to see if he needs treatment for something.