We’ve been trying to toilet train ds for years, he’s coming up to 7 now and we have tried since age 2. He’s very intelligent and totally understands the process but he has ASD, ADHD and a demand avoidant profile.
Basically the more we’ve focused on it the more he refuses. We’ve had specialist input and they have now told us that we need to stop totally. He wears pull ups and we don’t mention it. School are on board with this and happy to change him as they’ve always done. The psychologist and OT have said he clearly sees it as a high value requirement and we need to remove that expectation they seem to think once it’s not an issue he can use to control us that he will get bored and just decide to do it himself. They even suggested after a few weeks making some comments (reverse psychology?) about how happy we are we don’t have to go to the shops to buy any pants or something as they think he will then rebel and decide to use the toilet ?
We were trying reward charts and things and it had no impact. Has anyone used the approach we are being advised to ? Will it work? I struggle sometimes with the demand avoidant profile it makes things extremely difficult.