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Potty training

Is your child ready for potty training at nursery? Here's the place for all your toilet training questions.

Autistic 5 year old daughter will not use the toilet

3 replies

Fidgitigdif123 · 13/03/2025 16:50

Hiya!
Just after a bit of advice; my daughter is 5 years old and has just started school (reception). She was diagnosed with autism at 2, and we suspect she has ADHD aswell. She has global development delay, and needs to be constantly supervised but other than that she's a happy little girl. The school she attends is wonderful! It's a mainstream, but it has an absolutely fantastic SEN provision! It's so good that parents are queuing to get their SEN kids into this school. The waiting list is huge; we were extremely lucky to get in.
Anyway, we've been attempting to potty train her since just before her second birthday, and we had some success, only she would regress and we'd end up having to put her back into nappies. It was just a constant cycle of this. Recently the children's continence service said to put her into knickers with a continence pad, so that she would get used to wearing knickers instead of nappies. Their thinking was that she would get out of the habit of wearing nappies, and she would get used to wearing knickers instead and eventually move onto going on the toilet. The pads did quite a good job; they were very absorbant, poo's were slightly trickier, but not too bad to sort out.
She enjoyed wearing her knickers, and is no longer keen on wearing the nappies.
She would even sit on the toilet, although she won't do anything. But I felt like we were taking a step in the right direction, albeit with slow progress.

Then she started school.
They were happy to change her (I did ask them if they wanted me to come in to change her, but they said not to worry as they had the staff available to do it).
She started doing poo's at school, and the school have asked for us to send her in wearing a pull up. To be honest, it can't be pleasant for the staff to have to deal with a poopy pad, I don't blame them for that.
However, this has caused a lot of issues, and she gets upset that she can't wear her knickers to school. She is now completely refusing to even sit on the toilet or a potty.
I just don't know what to do anymore.
Does anybody have any advice on how best to go about this? Should I insist on her wearing the pads to school and tell them that I myself insist on coming up to change her? I only work weekends, so it's not like I have to leave work or anything to come up and do it...

OP posts:
tellmesomethingtrue · 14/03/2025 01:26

Pull up over knickers.

let me get this right… you were potty training a ONE year old!?? Insane

Fidgitigdif123 · 14/03/2025 16:51

tellmesomethingtrue · 14/03/2025 01:26

Pull up over knickers.

let me get this right… you were potty training a ONE year old!?? Insane

Tried that, didn't work.
It was a few days before she turned 2, so yeah. We had people complain at us because we didn't start trying to potty train her at 18 months. Can't win.

OP posts:
SweetMagnolia423 · 14/03/2025 17:18

That is a shame. It seems your DD was progressing well and the school has made her regress. I don’t blame her for being upset over having to go back to pull-ups.
i would stress to the school that it’s taken a good amount of time to get her to the knicker/pad setup and you are not going to allow her to be pushed backwards just for ‘their’ inconvenience.

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