potty training and eating

hello, I have a 4 almost 5 year old boy and he has autism. I was just wondering if anyone could relate to this- for instance, my son does not want to feed himself at all.  During mealtime i always end up feeding him with his utensils, has never even fed himself before, only finger foods, also when does potty training usually start with autistic children, even though i have 3 different kinds of potty chairs,with his favorite characters,etc. he is not interested.

[Sally44]

Are there any other distractions at mealtimes eg. TV/radio on?  My son is the same if he is watching TV, I always end up giving him his food because he is just absorbed in watching whats on TV.  He is much better with the TV off, but again, sometimes something distracts him and he needs my repeated prompting to bring him back on task.  If he is okay with fingerfood, have you tried just introducing a fork to begin with rather than having to co-ordinate a set of cutlery.  You could try and turn it into a game eg. fishing (using the work to catch the food).  You could get him to feed both of you eg. one for me one for you (as long as you think he will not always want to do that).
I know alot of autistic children can be much later at potty training.  My son did it at around the conventional time (3+ years).  But he does find it near impossible to urinate standing up.  I think he finds it difficult to understand his 'internal feelings'.  I have heard other autistic people talk about this.  They can sometimes not feel the need to eat/drink/go to the toilet.  At other times they may have a continual need to eat/drink/go to the toilet.  Does any of that sound familiar?  If so then his interpretation of his internal feelings is going to be different and sometimes unreliable.
Do you have any indication as to whether he doesn't like some aspect of it eg. the smell.
You don't say how you communicate with your son.  That is going to have a big impact on what his understanding of the toileting process is.
If he is verbal you can talk about it, or use social stories, visual pictures etc.  
Does he like the feeling of nappies?
Would it be possible in the summer to put him in pants during the day?  Or would this upset him/disruption of routine; or would he play with faeces?

[mum2beagain]

My 4 year old has similar issues. He is just starting to feed himself with a spoon. We are currently working with a "reward" type system with him. If he eats a specified number of spoons (we very the number) we reward him with a drink of his juice or a gold fish cracker (both things he loves). We also insist that he asks for "Help" if he wants us to help him with the spoon. We do it in a hand over hand fashion. So far this has been working for us but meal times take forever! Sometimes when time is short (like if his interventionist is coming) we have him do a few spoons then feed him the rest. We are taking it a day at a time.
Potty training has just been a matter of taking him on a regular basis, we started at 2 1/2, just by sitting him on the potty first thing in a morning and once or twice during the day, more often than not nothing happened but we persisted, eventually he did start to go, we gave him lots of praise and gold stars (no chart though; he didn't understand a chart), by  about 3 1/2 he was able to control his bladder muscles and urinate by choice and was staying dry through the night. He has only recently begun to say dry in between trips to the potty during the day but we must take him every 45 mins to a hour or he wets himself. He doesn't tell us when he needs to go, if we ask him he always says he doesn't need to go so we don't ask we just take him. Today he only wet one pull up and stayed dry with just one toilet trip whilst we were out for 3 hours. The next thing for us is training him for bowel movements, right now he prefers to go in his pull up, again we just take him to the potty when we know he is ready to go, at the moment he is very resistive to doing his BM on the potty as he was with urinating at first. We just make a big fuss and give lots of praise when he does do his BM on the potty and I'm sure in time he'll decide the potty is the best place for doing that too!!