Developing a Toilet Routine

Teaching your child to use the toilet correctly can be a difficult task, whether they have autism or not. Given that routines play an important role in the lives of people with autism, parents and educators of young children with ASD should aim to create step-by-step routines to hopefully make toilet training a success.

The first day I met and observed D, he REFUSED to go to the bathroom. Fast forward 2 months later and you would have never known that toilet training was ever an issue. With a lot of patience and consistency, I was able to develop a routine that worked for him.

Here is the strategy I used to develop a sucessful routine:

Visual schedules

Visual schedules are great tools because they may help to decrease language demands and promote an understanding of each step of the process. The also teach sequencing and provide children with predictability, which can help to relieve anxiety.

Here is a visual schedule for going to the bathroom that I have used with D.

Here is the visual schedule for hand washing that I use with D. Since I started working with him, he is now able to do each step of our hand washing routine with minimal to no assitance.

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