WHEN REGRESSION OCCURS: Potty Training Maintenance

Jack has been potty trained for a year. One whole year. I have loved life with him using the bathroom.

With impeccable timing, just when I declared my “expertise” in potty training and pretty much hung up my training hat forever, Jack decided to mix things up with some regression, potty training style.

Poopy underwear. Every day. It’s my favorite.

It seems that it became way too time consuming to bother with that pesky #2, so Jack just stopped going. And yes, that plan will catch up to you sooner or later, buddy.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about this recent practice, but it caused me to realize that I can’t get too comfortable or lose my focus when dealing with the ebbs and flows of childhood behavior, mixed with autism.

Time to form a new plan of attack:

Jack is excellent at repeating our motto, “just STOP and go to the bathroom!”; he just needs to remember to follow that advice.

Here are a few of my tricks this time around:

1. Putting the PlayStation/screens in Time Out several times
2. Taking off all of his lower clothing from around his ankles, to help him get in a good position on the toilet
3. Instituting cold rinse offs in the bathtub
4. Many conversations in the moment about how yucky this is and asking, “was that a good idea? What can you do next time?”
5. Lots of dedicated time sitting with him in the bathroom for daily mandatory “poop breaks”

We are getting back into the swing of regular toileting. I love it when he says things like, “I DID it!” or “You’re SO proud of me!”

Happy big kid Jack.

I think this regression sent me into a kind of weird funk, where suddenly I don’t know anything when I thought I did! Here I am, trying to pass on helpful information to an audience…and I don’t even have things figured out. Life happens, my kids have setbacks, and I have to stop and think through situations back at the drawing board. Parents are constantly humbled, aren’t they??

It’s probably beneficial to have a reminder of how smoothly things are sailing by having a small disruption in my course. In fact, I do see a lot of value to regularly and intentionally hanging out with Jack, even if it is in the bathroom.