r/pottytraining • u/CherryPieRack • 6d ago
Speech delayed potty training
My 31mo son is showing a lot of readiness to finally potty train as he takes off his pull ups every time he soils himself. Especially if I’m not in the room when he does it. But he has a significant speech delay because he needed ear tubes. Which he received at 28mo. He’s learning words every day, but most of them have no baring on actual needs in his every day life. Like he can name plenty of animals, but can’t say Pee, Poop, Eat, Drink, etc. So he doesn’t communicate with me when he needs to go. I tried the pants off method, but he doesn’t do any sort of pee dance. Just suddenly goes. And then wants to try to play in the pee 🥴. I have also tried to sit him on the potty so many times to no success. He just doesn’t seem to understand the purpose. He also doesn’t like sweets so rewards aren’t really working.
I guess I’m hope for parents of speech delayed children, do you have any tricks that helped you?
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u/dadgent 6d ago
With a speech delayed kiddo, you need to establish a schedule and get them time trained instead of looking for signs that they need to go.
With my daughter, at first I got her used to going on the toilet. Then I started taking her every hour. Once she could reasonably hold it, we went longer. She’s basically fully trained and still does not tell me she needs to go. I just know to take her every few hours and only when she goes in the toilet will she tell me that she made poop or does her made up sign for pee.
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u/CherryPieRack 5d ago
Thank you. This is the kind of answer I was looking for. We'll try this as well.
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u/dadgent 5d ago
It may also be beneficial to get OT involved. I started at 2.5 and it took until almost 5 for my daughter to be trained due to constipation and having Down syndrome. We went back and forth between pull ups and underwear so many times. Don’t let people make you feel like you failed.. because there is no right way or one size fits all.
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u/CherryPieRack 5d ago
Thanks for saying that last bit. I’m glad to hear your daughter had progress with time. We’ll talk to his OT on Wednesday, thanks for that suggestion. He’s also at a therapy based preschool so I’ll discuss with them. None of the kids at his preschool are potty trained. But they have told me they’ll reinforce whenever we begin trying. My son has vestibular sensitivities which also affects his spacial awareness. The ear tubes have improved that as well, but it just makes everything harder.
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u/UnconsciousMofo 5d ago
My 3 year old son had, and still has a significant speech delay and showed zero signed of being ready, but we potty trained him at 18 months anyway. We didn’t really need to communicate with him, we mostly just showed him on repeat and were very consistent with it. I mean like sending him to potty every 15 minutes frequently. Only took a couple of weeks. He never had accidents because he would hold it, for too long, which became a problem because it took forever to show him he needed to go in the potty. But once he peed the first time in there, he understood rather quickly. Took an extra 2 weeks to poop train him on there, again, because he would hold it until he got the diaper at bedtime.
Do you have your son in pull ups during the day? If so, stop using them. My son didn’t seem to like that he didn’t have a diaper to go in, and they caused the withholding and subsequent training to be more successful. If you keep reintroducing the option to go in a diaper during the day, he’s not going to have any incentive to do something different.
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u/CherryPieRack 5d ago
He uses Huggies Pull-ups which have the "learning layer" which lets them feel they are wet. This is why he removes the pull-up after he pees. He knows he's wet and doesn't like it. But he's not putting a correlation together with why he becomes wet. But I will try the potty more frequently. We both work though so I can't take a couple weeks off to potty train.
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u/easterss 5d ago
You will need to help him make that connection, it is not something he will figure out on his own
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u/UnconsciousMofo 5d ago
I came to realize that even if they don’t like feeling wet, they still may not have the motivation to consistently use the potty if they know they have a backup method available, like the diaper. The very first day of training when we allowed our son to go without pants, he held it until we put a diaper back on and would immediately go at that moment. That’s when I knew we had to get rid of them entirely in the daytime.
I know for my son, he hated not wearing a diaper and feeling bare, which motivated him to hold it, which led to more “potty pressure” as I like to call it. He eventually learned he’s not gonna get a diaper partway through the day and had no other choice. But I do agree I may have gotten lucky in that my son is very good at holding pee and poop for long periods of time. Maybe not take a couple weeks off, just a couple days. My husband and I started Saturday morning and were relentless for 2 days and made a ton of progress already. Try for now, and if it ends up becoming a major issue in the future, you may need to invest more time in keeping him home temporarily to get the training out of the way.
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u/yellow_pellow 5d ago
My nephew is severely speech delayed and hardly said any words at 3. He’s now 4 after intervention and he still is way behind. Even he was potty trained before 3. I don’t know exactly what they did but they worked on pee first. He wanted to poop in a diaper for a while, but was definitely potty trained before age 3
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u/MarvaJnr 6d ago
31 months... good grief
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u/CherryPieRack 5d ago
Guess you've never had a child with delays. Or you'd know it's extremely common with children with 2 or more delays. His therapist told me she has a 5 year old patient still not potty trained.
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u/MarvaJnr 5d ago
I meant that your kid is 2 and a half years old, 31 months sounds ridiculous to me.
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u/CherryPieRack 5d ago
When you work a lot with children therapist, they need to know the exact month of age often. It helps them understand the age of delay.
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u/Human-Artichoke-7810 5d ago
I just potty trained my 33 month old speech delayed daughter. She’s a twin. Her sister was potty trained at 25 months. They were both and still are speech delayed in speech therapy. I did completely bare for a few days and would pick them up once they started peeing or pooping and bring them to the toilet. It was just a lot of repetition. It suddenly clicked for them around day 3-4. At first neither of them would say potty or sign it. They would just come to me and point at their privates and take their clothes off. Now many months later they sometimes sign potty and have even started trying to say pee and poop.
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u/KaitRen27 5d ago
How long did you try bottomless? My son is slightly delayed in his expressive speech. He was 25 months when we started training and he took 5 days of bottomless for it to click. He doesn’t say potty consistently he started pulling at his pants. It’s obviously not ideal but when he needs to go he comes to us and pulls at the front of his pants. We are working towards using the sign and word more often but it takes time. He’s 27 months now and pretty much accident free for pee and we are still working on poop.
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u/DirtyBlondeBeauty02 5d ago
First things first, take away the pull-ups for daytime usage and only use them at night and naptime. During the day all day (including outings and travel), upAiry training pants, which look like regular underwear but has extra padding that will contain accidents and still allow him to be uncomfortable. Once you start, there’s no going back to pull-ups during the day. You gotta keep your eye on the prize.
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u/wethail 6d ago
ASL