The Toileting Toolbox

Let’s talk about building your toilet time toolbox! There are lots of things you might want to have in the bathroom to make toileting more successful and enjoyable for you and your child.

Building your toileting toolbox is also a great activity to do with your child to prepare for a sitting schedule.

A full transcript of the video appears below.

Hi, I’m Chayah Lichtig. I’m occupational therapy consultant and director of the Vermont Continence Project. Let’s talk about building your toilet time toolbox. There are lots of things you might want to have in the bathroom or available to you to make toileting more successful and enjoyable for you and your child. Building your toileting toolbox is also a great activity to do with your child to prepare for a sitting schedule.

Let’s start by thinking about the physical supports or supports for the body that your child will need when they are in the bathroom. The number one support that we suggest for all people, children and adults is a footstool. As you’ll learn from our toilet positioning video, a footstool is 100% necessary for children to be successful at having a full, easy and complete bowel movement while sitting on a Western style toilet. It is also essential for many, many children when trying to have a complete and relaxed pee because our high toilets do not make it possible for bodies to relax completely while sitting.

We also suggest a seat reducer for many, many children. Seat reducers are the inserts that you put into a toilet seat and you’ll see in the picture here the family style seat reducer, which is a seat reducer where the hinge of the smaller seat insert is built right into the larger seat. So it’s nice and secure and it’s easy to take out of the way when an adult is using that toilet.

We also suggest having a hot water bottle or a heating pad on deck so that when your child is trying to relax on the toilet, particularly if they’re going to be stooling, they have that support there to help them feel relaxed and cozy.

And finally, if your child is likely to do any sort of eliminating on the toilet, having wipes on hand can be a really good idea. It’s much easier to get clean that way than with toilet paper.

We also think supports for breathing are really important. Remember that to eliminate completely, you need to engage your abdominal muscles and then blow out forcefully as we talked about in the breathing video. So you can use all kinds of things. There are blow toys, things like kazoos or horns. You can also use something like a pinwheel. But if you don’t have any of those things, a ball of toilet paper will do the trick!

Other things that you’ll want to have in the bathroom are things that give your child information, especially information about how long you are expecting them to sit, if they are still in the phase where they are working on getting their body to pee or poop when they get to the toilet. So we’ve talked about in many other videos making sure that you have a clock or some kind of timer on hand in the bathroom that shows the time not just tells it if that’s not accessible to your child.

We also suggest something like a short song. That’s the length of the amount of time that you want your child to set. So one Jingle Bells is the amount of time that your child is going to sit on the toilet. You may also want to queue up some videos about bowel and bladder function. Finally, your child may want some entertainment on the toilet that could be in the form of books or magazines. It could be something like a lap mat that they can manipulate or some kind of fidget or Rubik’s Cube. It doesn’t really matter what they’re holding on to, so long as it’s not really, really engrossing like a tablet or phone might be. And the reason is that we want the child to be focused on their body sensations.

Finally, no toileting toolbox would be complete without a treasure chest of rewards. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, but for some children, being able to see the rewards that they’ll be able to get once they engage in the toilet task we’re asking of them? That can be a big motivator. Make sure that you have those rewards on hand and close by, but not so easy to get to that your child can reach them whenever they please. We often say a high shelf. It’s a great location.

Thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video. The information contained in this video is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional health or medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health care professional.