Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi,
My 9 year old daughter is still on the waiting list to be officially assessed for ASD.
She refuses to acknowledge that she needs the toilet (1's and 2's) and will only go when told.
The school will ask her if she wants to go, but can not force her to go. For the last few years, she obviously had a bladder made of steel because she was able to hold in a wee all day and then go when she got home. Now though, she is starting to wet herself on a daily basis and has started bed wetting again.
I'm worried that other children in school will start talking and this will bring a whole new level of anxiety for my daughter.
She has literally been standing in the bathroom before and still wet herself because I didn't tell her to go to the toilet.
Any help/advise would be great
Should say he was a similar age 8/9 when he was daytime wetting. It was after a period of being completely dry which confused us but sorted it eventually.
My son did this. He would be so focused on his activity he wouldn’t go and just dribble wee until he was wet. We were advised to get him to drink more water during the day and stop 1-2 hours before bed. It definitely helped with the daytime wetting as the signals were stronger.We lifted him to the toilet at night (when we went to bed) until he was 11. At this point his bedtime got late enough that he could hold his wee all night.
I agree, a set routine for wees at school would help. Also checking the toilets are ok for her. I work with a boy who has a completely debilitating fear of hand dryers so I take him to the toilets in another block where there are no dryers.
I do know someone who had a similar issue.
The child was getting UTI’s from holding in wee. What she did was to schedule toilet time. Set a timer, or just express a regular time when she should go and sit on the toilet. Her body should eventually voluntarily eliminate the waste, and she can go about her business. This may take some time.
The school asking if she needs to go is pointless. She’s going to say no because she can’t register when she needs to go.
Again, perhaps they could allow her a set time to go off and sit on the toilet. Perhaps when it’s quiet and calm.
Many autistics have poor interoception; interoception is awareness of internal signals from the body. For example, I have occasional flare-ups of a gut problem, and he best way of dealing with them is not to eat solid food, in order to rest the gut. I can quite easily go 6 or 7 days without eating, because I do not experience hunger in the same way as most people. It sounds like your daughter either cannot feel the need to go to the toilet, or is unable to recognise the feeling. It may be useful to find out if she has any change to her internal feeling just before she starts to urinate, if she does then you can work on this to enable her to recognise when she needs to go, before it happens. Alternatively, you can try to get her to consciously monitor her inner feelings from time to time during the day, so that she can perhaps pick up on faint signals. Even having her press on her belly just above the pubic bone, where the bladder sits, from time to time might give her some feed-back on how full her bladder is.