Toilet training with speech and language delay

[magicmaiden1]

Hi all

My daughter has a speech and language development delay. She turned 3 on Wednesday and it is only fairly recently I feel that she is ready to be toilet trained. So far so good. I've left the nappies off, and she is weeing and pooing in the potty. I'm confident enough now that I can leave the living room for a minute and she will wee/poo without my prompting and will bring the potty to me when I'm back in the room when she's finished. We've got into a routine then of going upstairs to the bathroom, she has a wipe and puts the tissue down the loo and flushes it. Then she washes her hands and wipes them dry.

Because she has speech/language delay, I'm struggling with teaching her the best way to alert me that she needs the loo because I feel now the next step is her going to the toilet. Because it's upstairs, she will have to let me know so I can go up with her. I've tried putting the potty at the bottom of the stairs so that she has to go outside of the living room to go to the toilet but she ends up bringing the potty back in the room. I'm afraid that she may have formed an attachment to the potty also. I have a booster seat and step for the actual toilet and when brushing her teeth before bed I have been encouraging her to sit on the toilet even if she doesn't go, just for 5-10 minutes. I've been doing this throughout the day. Once she did wee on the loo, so big praise. But that was about 2 weeks ago and she hasn't done it since when she has sat on the loo. My gut tells me that the best thing to do is to take her upstairs every so often and sit with her on the loo until she has a wee.

Has anybody got any ideas as to how to get to the next stage and with a speech delay?

Maybe make your own communication cards, get her to hold it and show you everytime she uses the potty, draw her potty on it.
once she has the hang of that, put the potty in the bathroom at first, so she is going to the room.

I would move the potty to the bathroom too. We did this with DS, and he got the idea well. (mild sl delay)

My DD has speech delay too, and at 2.6 year old now we're starting to potty train her.

I think moving the potty upstairs as already mentioned is a good idea, or having the current one downstairs and another upstairs.

Also, suggest she come up whenever you are going to the toilet and reinforce the idea that toilets are what she'll progress on to and narrate all you're doing - using loo roll, flushing, washing hands etc.