Yet another toilet training issue.

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Youngest (4) finally potty trained this week. He's been using the toilet at school for a few months now, but adamantly refusing at home...until Monday, when he got dressed early, and went upstairs to use the toilet instead of using the pull-up that he normally uses.

We were ecstatic. We made a big deal of it, gave him a special toy that we'd promised him months earlier if he started using the toilet, and gave him many congratulations. He was very proud of himself, and although the next two days featured several accidents, by yesterday it seemed like we were over the hump. The toy was a big hit, and he's been sleeping with it all week.

And then, today. He's been peeing in the toilet no problem, but he's been refusing to poop -- he wants to put on a pull-up just for that. Yesterday, he went in the toilet very happily. Same with the day before. No problems, no complaints, and he made sure to tell me first thing when I came home from work. Today, he "hates" it, and does NOT want to sit on the toilet. He can't/won't explain why, beyond this newfound "hate", and broke into sobbing and wailing when we pressed the issue.

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.

It seems the lesser evil; he's stubborn enough to hold it for a few days, and that's something that could cause real problems,

Any idea as to what spawned this sudden hate, and how we might deal with it. He won't hesitate to go back to pull-ups full time, I know...and that's the last thing that we want at this point.

I trained mine a few months before his 4th birthday, he's 4 1/2 now (he still doesn't wipe himself or put his pants back on). Half the time he uses the toilet and half the time he still uses the kiddie potty. Would he go in a kiddie potty? That would at least be better than a pull-up.

Edit: My son has also for no reason decided he no longer wants to use public toilets.

My son is seven and still uses the kiddy potty for #2. I am going to try working on this during the summer when he has less stress. He will not poop in our regular potty or poop anywhere but home.

I think he is afraid of falling in, even with the baby potty thing you can put on the regular toilet.

I would tell him that as long as he pees in the toilet and only puts on a pull up when he's going to poop, not wearing one all day, that he could have the toy. I think he will get tired of having to go change from underwear to pull up to poop after a few days/weeks. Also tell him that he has to wipe himself afterwards and throw away the pull up and change back into clothes.

That way you compromise. He gets the pull up and the toy, and he will see soon that it's just too much trouble to deal with and he will start pooping in the toilet like you want him to.

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I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
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Is it possible he used a toilet with an automatic flush? Those stupid things ruined my daughter for some time. One autoflushed while she was still on the toilet and it really scarred her. I am not mis-typing "scared." She was scarred. It took a long time before she wasn't fearful of the toilet.

Automatically flushing toilets and hand-driers may be great inventions, but they really suck for kids on the spectrum.

He actually *loves* flushing the toilet; it's his favorite part of the whole process.

Second favorite, actually -- attempting to fill the toilet with flushable wipes, or (once those are all gone) toilet paper are apparently his newest game.

(Trying to understand is pointless. "Why did you do X, Youngest?" "Because I did," he invariably chirps in response.)

And we've not been near anywhere with an autoflush. They certainly don't have them at his school.

He is so, so stubborn. It'll take him far, in the end, but it's very frustrating right now. Once he makes up his mind about something, it's damned near impossible to change it

Right, things have gotten bad.

He's now decided that he doesn't want to poop at all. It's been five days. Not on the toilet, not in a pull-up, nothing. Immune to bribes, indifferent to loss of privilege, we could not convince him. Nor would he even touch the prune juice we bought....

He's been complaining about tummy aches for the past two days, and is spending most of him time prone on the couch. Desparate, his mom offered him the ULTIMATE bribe -- a Happy Meal. And he couldn't go.

We've got a miralax perscription, and we're going to start giving that to him. Getting him to drink it all at one go will be tough, but it's not impossible. What worries me is that if we don't see any movement, so to speak, in the next 24 hours? We need to give him an enema.

This will be a nightmare, and I honestly wonder if the two of us will be physically capable of holding him down for it. And my god, it's going to be a traumatic experience for the entire household. I hope it doesn't come to this, but if it does?

Any advice? At all?

Believe it or not, this is a very common consequence of potty training - at this point, he may be so constipated that he genuinely can't go. Here's a post that seems sound to me: http://voices.yahoo.com/how-potty-train ... tml?cat=25

A kid on the spectrum may benefit from having the whole process explained concretely and logically, along with the reasons why going every so often (you may want to give a concrete time frame - how often did he go when in diapers?) is really important.

FWIW, we had no idea DS was on the spectrum when he was little, and he was in pullups until he was nearly 5. I was very frightened, but the school helped work with him (they explained "no pullups in kindergarten" and he decided to go along with that.) He was perfectly able and capable of being potty trained significantly earlier (I originally thought we were going to get it done early!) but decided it wasn't for him.

We did do the hybrid thing of having DS change himself into pullups when he wanted to have a BM. I also tried to keep the clean-up process as matter-of-fact as possible (when he was a baby, we had lots of playtime while I distracted him enough to clean him up - I wonder if some of our delay was him missing that time.) Maybe having him take other responsibilities, like getting cleanup supplies together and throwing away the diaper (or even shaking it out and flushing the poop) will help?

If you put Miralax in orange juice and let it sit in the fridge overnight, it becomes almost unnoticable. Even my super picky DS7 (who can detect minute changes to anything) drank it without comment. You don't have to drink it in one sitting. Just make up 16 oz and suggest a large drink of juice several times over the course of the day. It's not immediate relief, and when the poop finally does come it will be a disgusting goop the consistency of peanut butter that is really hard to flush down.

For quick relief, we've used PediaLax glycerine suppositories. It comes as a liquid in an applicator that you insert and then squeeze the bulb. The first time was pretty scary for DS, but since then he's come to request them. He did end up sitting in a bath of hot water to finally "go" the first time.

That is great! I was really worried for you. Hopefully he'll start pooping regularly now.