I’m not sure where on the web to post some of these questions, but I’m *SURE* that all of you, with such a wealth of experience in animal training, will have some insights into what may, and may not work, and why. (See the recent post on ‘Paying children to learn’!) I’d be very grateful to hear any of your thoughts on these issues.
My colleague has a 7 year old daughter with incontinence issues. There are physical problems, but these are not being helped at all by the psychological/behavioural .
- She is being bullied at school for wetting.
- She has got to the stage where she would rather sit there and wet herself than deal with going to the bathroom, and sit there wet all day rather than change.
- She will lie about whether she has wet, or whether she has been to the bathroom, or whether she actually did anything when she got there.
- She has developed a phobia of toilets. (I don’t like manky public loos myself and will avoid them where possible!) She will flush and literally claw at the walls of a cubicle to get out as quick as possible.
- Even at home, getting her to go and just sit on the toilet has become an ordeal.
- Being asked about it, or having underwear checked to see what the days situation is, has got to be adding to the distress (hey, it would freak me out)
Medically, it is not seen as a ‘problem’ here until she is 8.
She cannot see a psychologist until she is 8.
The counsellor the family have seen has recommended star charts, which the family have already tried.
I asked whether they had suggested wearing pads at school, but the thinking is that allowing her to be wet and aware of the consequences will encourage her to make the connection.
My immediate question was about the reward system. She gets a star for being dry all day, and then gets to choose her reward when she gets a certain number of stars. She rarely manages a dry day, and is not actually bothered about the stars, or the reward.
So my amateur dog training head made me think:
- The action and the reward are divorced. It needs to be immediate.
- The reward needs to be something she would actually like.
- She is failing = no reward. The frequency of rewards needs to be increased, to a dry morning, a dry afternoon, a dry evening, to give her the chance to actually succeed.
- Just *going* to the bathroom is tricky, so getting her to perform in there is unlikely, and enquiring or listening at the door will be stressful in itself. So why not start by rewarding just *going* to the bathroom, the behaviour on which everything else depends?
My initial thought would be for a glass jar of wonderful things to mysteriously appear out of reach in the bathroom, with nothing said. And every time she is noticed going to sit on the loo, she gets something. It might make her want to go, go more often, and actually let an adult know she is there.
Of course, this is not possible at school at the moment – but if she can’t be comfortable doing it in her own home, then school is pretty unlikely anyway.
And if we KNOW it will be difficult to work on it at school to start with, would pads not at least help stop the bullying and unpleasant associations she has there? The summer holidays are approaching, and if they were able to make progress towards dry days at home, then they would be in a better position to deal with the toileting at school issue when term starts again, already having established a rewardable behaviour established in another location.
I would be so interested to hear your thoughts, ideas and hints about possible pitfalls, and I’m sure some of you will have experienced this with your own children. My heart just went out to her, enduring relentless punishment and not being given a way to succeed.
Many thanks,
Sarah
(3 dogs and a parrot, but no children!)
