Ahh... Toilet training! That delightful challenge every parent has to face… and it can be pretty hard work at the best of times, even with healthy children. So imagine how tricky things can get when you add autism into the mix. But help is at hand, and we’re going to look at a few tips and techniques you can try to make potty training easier and, hopefully, more successful.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 1:  Patience – Your Number 1 Virtue

Never lose sight of the fact that it’s going to be a bit of a journey and it won’t be straightforward. So don’t get totally wound up and don’t feel a failure. You might have to try more than one thing to find the right solution for your child. Every child is different and there’s no one-size-fits-all quick, clean easy answer.

2:  Is your Child Ready?

Just because you might have read somewhere that children are ready at the age of two, it doesn’t mean that it’s the magic age for your child. You have to look for signs of readiness, and these could show much later than average. For example, look for signs of your child:    

• being aware that they have a wet or dirty diaper/nappy – they could pull at it, or take it off, for instance
• being able to imitate what you do – so you can effectively demonstrate sitting on the toilet    
• responding well to positive reinforcement – when you give your child something they like they’re more likely to do the behaviour you’re teaching them. (We call this ‘loving bribery’ in our house)
• staying clean and dry most nights 

3:  When should you start?

If your child shows the readiness signs later than average children, don’t worry – it’s quite usual for autistic children. Just make sure that your child is happy to co-operate, can sit on a potty for a toilet for a short time, is able to dress and undress and recognises the clues that mean they need the bathroom.

4:  Coping with Impaired Social Interaction

Problems understanding language and logic could mean that your child finds it difficult to understand what they’re expected to do. Why should they pee or poop in the toilet or potty rather than their diaper or nappy? And they also may find it difficult to express what they need. Your challenge here is to recognise their cues and help them to tell you what they want.

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

 5:  Coping with Sensory Problems

Unusual reactions to sensory stimuli – for instance, smells temperature and sounds – are experienced by many autistic children, so watch how your child reacts in or near the bathroom. Do the different smells from cleaning liquids and perfumes in the room cause problems? Is the bathroom colder or hotter than other rooms and do they respond negatively to the change in temperature? Do the noisy pipes and flushing toilet upset them?

The key here is to remove as many of the upsetting obstacles as you can. That could mean putting lower wattage lights in the room, making sure your child wears socks or slippers on the tiled floor or explaining the noises and making them into a game.

6:  Using Rewards

This is my family’s ‘Loving Bribery’ system! By the way, it works a treat with all toddlers and most adults, so by all means use widely! First, identify something your child loves. This could be a food treat or special drink, or maybe a particular toy. Then make sure that everyone only gives your child this reward as part of toilet training. The aim is to associate the loved thing with a specific behaviour and so increase the likelihood of that behaviour happening.

7:   Identify Your Child’s Routine

By creating a time log of what your child does and when – and what the outcomes are – you will be able to build these times into your toilet training. So, over a week, write down times your child eats and drinks, wets, soils and is changed. Then when you know, for example, that your child wets 15 minutes after drinking you can make that part of the toilet training process.

8:   Punishment is Outlawed!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Toilet accidents are not to be punished. It’s far more useful to use them as opportunities to explain to your child why they should use the potty. Make sure that everyone who has contact with your child understand this and follows your system.

9:   And Stress is Outlawed, Too!

There is absolutely no benefit to you or your child getting stressed and harassed over potty training. If your child feels pushed into a corner they won’t co-operate and they’ll turn against the very things you’re trying to get them to use. Let them get used to the potty or toilet without expecting results. make as much of this into a game as you can. And DON’T get wound up yourself. You do need to be strong, cool and calm.

And finally… Remember what we’ve said throughout this article: the Potty Training Process IS going to take time… just give it the time it needs for your child to latch onto a new idea and a new skill. And stay positive!

Related articles

    
• 10 Great Tips for Potty Training Boys

• Tales From the Potty

• Dumb Mom’s Guide. How to Potty Train Dudes.

• Toilet training dramas. Daughter hates potty.

• Life Lessons From the Potty

Rather than being a social network, HootSuite allows you to connect to multiple social networks from one website. You can schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms plus track campaign results and industry trends to rapidly adjust tactics.

Scheduling status update is a way to make sure that status updates go out at the perfect time, whether or not you are there to post them. But be careful not to over do it! Try to mix it with your activity because people don’t like it if everything that you post is automated.

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 It’s a great tool to add to your toolbox of marketing

We all want to save money on charges for international and local calls and that’s were Viber comes in handy If you already know about this app and are using it, brilliant! But this post might help some of you out there!

The Viber app allows iPhone and Android users to make FREE phone calls and texts to each other, either with a 3G connection or Wi-Fi connection with no complexity at all. Once two iPhone/Android users have the app installed on their phones and their numbers are present in each other’s contact lists you can start using it. After installation Viber determines who on your contact list is using Viber and a Viber icon appears alongside their name.

Installation is Free

In the App store or Android market search for Viber and install. Then register your phone number and you receive immediately an SMS/text message with a code. You simply enter this code into Viber and that’s it! You are good to go.

How it works

It’s very simple to use. Instead of using your iPhone’s phone app, you use the purple Viber App instead.  If you’ve finished the registration Viber has automatically detected who of your contacts are using Viber. Watch the video below to see how it works

I hope this was helpful. Please share this post and tell your friends about Viber

Happy chatting!

Audur

Do you know the difference between a personal profile and a business page?

Do you ask people to be a friend to your business or to like your business?

Many small business owners are still setting up their business on a second Profile rather than a Facebook Page so here is a post to clarify!

What is a profile?

When you sign up to Facebook you create a personal profile and you invite “friends” to join you and become a friend with people. So far, so good right? But the problem comes when people set up a second profile for their small businesses. We still see this, so some people are not setting up their business right on Facebook.

According to Facebook, personal profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name. You are only allowed to hold one personal profile. If you set up your business as a second personal profile, you are contravening Facebook’s terms of service and they can shut your second profile (business) down at any time. If that happens you will lose all your “friends” and all the content on your second profile without any notice. If you think about it, when you are asking people to “friend” your business you are also asking them to allow you to access their holiday snapshots, check out their marital status and pry into their personal lives. It is not professional.

What are pages?

According to Facebook, pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook. Pages have number of advantages over profiles;

• They can be found by search engines. Your status on your Page is searchable too
• They can be seen by people not logged into Facebook
• They track user analytics so you can see how many people have seen your post and your response rate as well as tracking the activities of your page (page insights)
• You are unlimited by how many people can “like” your Page
• You can create widgets and like buttons that are easy to embed into your website and blog,  Facebook creates the code for you that you copy and paste into a widget on your website/blog
• You can set up additional Page admins to have access to managing your page without sharing passwords
• People who like your page can’t see the Page admins and they don’t have access to your personal account
• You can have as many pages as you want

We hope this post gave you some clarification on the difference. If you want to create a page on Facebook click here 

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very;”
your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.’
Mark Twain

That well-worn phrase ‘less is more’ could have been invented for writing websites. Short, sharp, succinct and to the point – that’s the kind of copy your users want to read. And, be honest, that’s the kind of stuff you want to find when you visit a site, isn’t it? Not reams of padding.

But the finely honed phrase doesn’t just appear from nowhere. You have to work at it. So here’s my simple, Five-Step Editing Technique for getting the results you want:

1 Open a new page and just write. Anything, everything – get it all out and say what you want.

2 Read it over carefully; get it in order so that the story flows.

3 Now – be prepared to delete. Cut out anything you don’t need: long-winded sentences; vague filler content; repetitions. Check words like ‘that’ and ‘very’ – see Mark Twain’s advice above. If it doesn’t add anything – delete!

4 Re-write wordy cliches like ‘on a weekly basis’, ‘in a position to’ or ‘for the purpose of’.

5 Leave for at least 30 mins (overnight is even better). Then re-read – preferably out loud and with feeling. Tighten up the copy where needed. (Repeat Step 5 if necessary.)

Et voila! You’ll have a lean, mean fighting piece of copy that really does the business.

Remember, you can’t bore people into buying.

I wish I started my blog a long time back when there was a lot less competition.

I wish I was able to write great content from the start.

I wish I had the money to purchase hosting and set up a self-hosted WordPress blog.

I wish, I wish, I wish…

How many of us have wished for something like this in the past? Or, worse yet, is still wishing for things to happen just like that?

I know I have. And I bet a lot of you have wished for something similar as well.

The problem with the “I wish” mentality

Do you know what’s stopping you from becoming the most sought after blogger in your niche?

You!

Yeah, you heard me right. The biggest obstacle to your blogging success is none other than you.

I know this for a fact, because I have been in the same position. I started many blogs, built many successful ones … and then let them die. Yeah, just like that.

There wasn’t enough motivation for me to keep going. So in effect, I was my own bottleneck.

Right now I am determined to change all that. Today, I want to share what I have learned from the past five years of blogging with you so that you realize:

• there’s no reason why you can’t be a success today, even if you feel you should have started a blog long time back
• consuming more information may be counterproductive for you
• there is no reason why you should have a self-hosted WordPress blog either (I do believe that having one is best for business, though).

3 Rules for overcoming the “I wish” mentality

Rule #1: Stop wishing

First of all, you need to realize that wishing is not going to make things any better.

Sure, you could wish you started blogging five years back. But five years down the line, you’d be surprised to find that you’d still be thinking the same. You’ll think then, “I wish five years back I wasn’t dumb enough to not start a blog because I thought I was too late.”

If you keep on wishing, the only thing that’s going to happen is that you’ll never realize your dreams, and others will get ahead of you.

So rule #1 for overcoming the “I wish” mentality is to stop wishing. If you want to wish, wish for world peace. If at all your wish comes true, you’d be satisfied that you contributed to a greater good.

Rule #2: Stop consuming too much information

When I started out, I believed that reading all the information I could get my hands on was the best way to learn and grow. How wrong I was!

Information is always good. But once it becomes too much, it’s going to negatively affect your growth.

At one point I was on a buying spree, and spent more than $2000 on information products and courses. Guess what I did with all that information? Nothing! Really, those courses and ebooks are sitting in my computer collecting digital dust. I haven’t even consumed 5% of everything I bought. Talk about a waste of money.

“I wish” I could go back in time and stop myself from buying so many info products and save some cash. But there’s no use wishing. The damage is already done.

I want you to stop investing your time and money into learning as much as you can. You’ll end up wishing for more information. So stop buying things you don’t actually need. Instead, act on what you already know.

Rule #3: Stop thinking about being a pro all the time

We all want to be pros, right? You can either be a “somebody” in blogging or be a “nobody” in blogging. Which would you chose? I’d rather choose the “somebody” over “nobody” any day.

And what’s the first pro tip we all read about blogging? That you need to have a self-hosted blog. If you run a business, there is no doubt that it’s true. But if you are starting out, there is no reason for having a self-hosted blog.

People think that they need to appear professional in order to get acceptance, and they wait for the perfect time to start so they have enough money for hosting and a domain name, getting a unique theme coded for their blog, and even learning coding to customize the blog themselves.

Do you see a problem here? You are just adding complexity to what is, at heart, a rather simple thing.

Most people never get around to getting everything done, so they don’t start a blog at all. So just start a free blog on WordPress or Blogger if you don’t have the money right now to go the self-hosted route. Having a blog is better than not having a blog.

Over to you

Are you still stuck with the “I wish” mentality, or have you experienced it? How did you overcome it? Let us know in the comments.

Adarsh Thampy is a blogger and advices small and medium business on effective content marketing strategies. You can read more on the topic of content marketing by following Adarsh @conversionchamp.