ABSTRACT
Until a child has learned to toilet himself properly and without a re-minder, the parent and the child must suffer problems of hygiene, skin irritations, excessive dependence on the parent, inconvenience, expense, and, as the child matures, also social embarrassment. Although all normal children seem to learn eventually to toilet themselves, parental "common sense" procedures have resulted in no more benefit than has occurred without training. A method has been developed for rapidly training the retarded to toilet themselves without prompting. The success of those efforts indicated that similar and even more rapid training might be achieved with normal children by use of that general method. The general method was to provide an intensive learning experience that maximized the factors known to be important for learning; then to fade out these factors once learning had occurred.
