Potty Training Special Needs Children
Recommended Books

I have had a number of parents & teachers buy our potty training dolls, especially Potty Scotty™ to assist with potty training their developmentally delayed children.

I know that Toilet Training in Less Than a Day method by Nathan H. Azrin and Richard M. Foxx was developed when these two psychologists were trying to research toilet training for special needs children. In the foreward of their book, they talk about how they could successfully toilet trained severely developmentally delayed people in 3 days. When they applied these methods and techniques to normal children, the results exceeded their expectations - the average child of normal intelligence required less than half a day of training - hence the Toilet Training in Less Than a Day!!

I personally do not have any experience in potty training special needs children, so I turned to my dear friend Jackie whose son Jared is autistic. Jackie told me that she used the following book to help her potty train Jared.

Toilet Training for Individual with Autism & Related Disorders. A Comprehensive Guide for Parents & Teachers. It have over 200 toilet training tips and more than 40 case examples with solution.

The book is written by Maria Wheeler who has her M.Ed and has spent greater than 20 years in the fields of Psychology and Special Education, with an emphasis on Neurobehavioral Disorders, Applied Behavior Analysis and Specific Learning Disabilities.

Ms Wheeler holds Texas teacher certificates/endorsements in Serious Emotional Disturbance and Autism, Special Education and Psychology. She is nationally recognized speaker and trainer in the fields of autism, behavior and learning disorders and effective discipline.

I hope you find this book useful and helpful. As I learn more about this, I will continue to add information and products to the web site.

Below are two customer reviews from Amazon.com on this book:

Review 1 - 5 stars - 40 out of 45 people found the review useful.
My 3 and a half year old son was diagnosed with (high functioning) Autistic Spectrum Disorder last month. While we're still dealing with the shock of the diagnosis, it was a relief to read that children with ASD are among the hardest to train. We have been attempting toilet learning for the past two years using "traditional" methods and have not had one single success. What a relief to find out that these traditional methods do not work well with autistic children! We are looking forward to working with my son's teachers using the methods described in the book. The book is also a good overview of problems people with Autism have in the toileting arena - we now have a better idea of what potential problems my son may have later (ie, using public restrooms) and feel empowered by the strategies suggested in dealing with them BEFORE they happen.

Review 2 - 3 stars - 6 of 6 people found the review useful.
There is some good information and advice in this book but I wish that the author would have organized things better. She also spends too much time explaining why it is important for your child to be potty trained. I already know why I want my kid trained--don't waste my time explaining that to me! So far I have not been able to get my son trained but for a long time, he would not even sit on the potty and now he does regularly. I am going to try some mainstream books now and use this book as a reference for problem areas.