He is not going to potty train himself. My goodness, right now he does his business in his pants and someone else cleans him....from his view, not a bad deal at all.

Oh, he will be possibly be teased by teachers and others....

Why would they think that he will be potty train himself?

The reasoning is beyond us. They basically just give us this whole "Well he knows how to use the toilet, he'll figure it out." She is also still nursing her three year old. We are at a loss at to what to do.

When I lived in a foster home as a teenager, they brought in two boys who were brothers. One was 8 and the other 5 or 6. The younger of the two was still in diapers. Not pull-ups. Diapers. He screamed in terror when bathed and was anorexically thin, yet he was obviously not starving, because for the first several weeks he refused to eat anything except junk food. The foster mom of course tried to potty train him, but more often than not he would rather pull down his pants and take a dump on his bedroom floor than go into the bathroom, which was right next to his room, only three feet away. The boy showed signs of mental retardation, but not severe enough that he couldn't be trained to use a toilet. His mother obviously never bothered to teach him.

Twilit_violet, it could be that the boy's mental challenges might have posed the biggest obstacles to toilet training him. As a mother of a severely mentally handicapped boy, I would love to save the money on diapers. But right now I don't think I could push David into potty training cuz he really has not shown all the readiness signs yet and I think it would overwhelm him. Diapers are much better than pull-ups because you get more for the $$ and they are more absorbent. Given David's mental age, diapers make more sense anyway. I know that autistic children are very difficult to potty train as well.