This page may contain affiliate links for your convenience, which helps to support the work here at Balls and Balloons. However, if I wouldn’t recommend an item to my mother and my best friend, I won’t recommend it here, either!
Can we talk about bathrooms for a minute? Especially public restrooms? After all, we ALL have to use them… but we rarely talk about them. For most of us, it’s not something we think too much about – we just use the available bathroom wherever we are and move on with our day.
HOWEVER….for some of the population, using a public restroom can be excruciatingly difficult!
This can be true for any young child (and therefore that child’s parents!), but it is especially true for children with sensory processing disorder.
A public restroom can honestly be a nightmare, causing severe sensory overload for children: the toilets that flush automatically when you’re not expecting it…the hand dryers that sound like an airplane taking off…water faucets that turn on and off automatically…it’s enough to send a previously calm child into a full-blown meltdown!
When E was 4 years old and R was just 6 months old, I spent a lot of time in the car with them making trips between our small hometown in Michigan and the west suburbs of Chicago. My husband was working there in the Chicago area, and we were in the process of selling our home in Michigan and finding a new home in Illinois.
Naturally, this meant that we had to stop regularly and use public restrooms during our trips. E had always hated auto-flush toilets and hand dryers, and even R (who has no significant sensory sensitivities) would cry every time someone turned on a hand dryer.
Needless to say, it only took a couple of trips to figure out which restaurants had bathrooms that were “safe” to use with my kids – the ones with quiet, manual flush toilets and paper towels…or at least the quiet hand dryers. We would only stop at those restaurants, because let’s face it…when you’re traveling with young children, it is simply not worth it to stop somewhere that will inevitably cause more tears!!
Over the years, we’ve found some tricks and tips that help make our trips go more smoothly. I hope some of these can help you, too!
1. Avoid Public Restrooms
I know that seems a little too obvious, but…there are so many times where that’s the easiest solution. Perhaps my all-time favorite purchase for my kids is this travel potty.
Obviously, any travel potty will work, but I have liked this one because it folds up very compactly and uses disposable bags (so it’s easy to just throw the mess in any trash). It also can be used as a travel potty seat on a regular toilet, so it is multi-functional.
Stuck in a traffic jam with no exit in sight for over an hour? Use the travel potty.
Child needs to go even though you just made a stop 25 minutes ago? Stop by the side of the road and use the travel potty.
Simply don’t feel like wrangling all of your kids into a fast-food place or gas station just so one child can use the bathroom? Use the travel potty!
A few Kleenex to wipe with (which are always in the car anyway), and some sanitizing hand wipes (which are always in the car, too), and you’re good to go!
2. Use Post-It Notes
Obviously, there are many times when avoiding a restroom with auto-flush toilets just isn’t possible. Using airport restrooms, for instance, is definitely a necessity! Even for a child without any sensory sensitivities, auto-flush toilets can be downright scary, since those sensors are not made for little bottoms!
This tip is one of my favorites, but I can’t take any credit for it. My wonderful sister-in-law told me about it, and we’ve used it ever since. Take a small Post-it Note and place it over the sensor on the toilet.
Once your child is finished with her business, have her take the Post-it Note off the sensor to allow it to flush. Voila! You’ve essentially turned that toilet into a manually flushing toilet, thus eliminating any surprises for your child!
You can also use Post-It Notes for automatic faucets, since it always seems like children’s hands are too small to make those faucets stay on enough to actually rinse soap off.
I like to use the small Post-It Notes, since a pack of those live easily in a side pocket of my purse, readily available whenever the situation arises.
3. Avoid the Hand Dryers
I have to admit, I absolutely ABHOR hand dryers in public restrooms. Judging by all of these memes that I’ve seen online, I’m far from being the only one! They are horrendously loud, and they really don’t dry your hands well at all! Please, for the love of all that is sacred, just give us some paper towels!!!
Truth be told, I’d never found a good solution for this issue…until just recently. I realized it would be easy to keep some of these disposable Kleenex Hand Towels in my purse. Since I hate to carry a large purse, I just take a few out, keep them in a Ziploc bag, and break one out when needed…thus saving my shirt from being used as a towel!
4. Block Out the Noise
Even if you use tips #2 and #3 for your own family, you obviously cannot control whether OTHER people use the hand dryers. Add in the random flushing of other toilets, people talking, and the fact that bathrooms are an acoustic nightmare for a sensory-sensitive child, and frankly, the noise can be overwhelming.
Putting on the headphones can help in any loud environment…and that certainly includes a bathroom! We’ve used and loved these Baby Banz brand headphones, but really any pair of noise-reducing headphones will work! If your child can handle the sensation of earplugs, that would be an excellent solution as well – easy to carry with you, unobtrusive, and simple!
5. Give it Time
One of my favorite bloggers, Jess at Diary of a Mom, often says “Now is not forever, and never is a load of crap.” I LOVE that statement because in truth, there are so many times when Now feels like Forever. And when it feels like “We will NEVER be able to….”. Some of you reading this may feel that you will NEVER be able to just use a public restroom without your child melting down…and I’m here to remind you that Now is NOT Forever.
I just recently took this picture of E…as she happily used the hand dryer in a public restroom. My younger self would never have believed she could get to that point, yet here she is. There are still days where her senses are on high alert and she can’t handle the noise of the dryer, but the days when she can use them occur with more frequency all the time.
So use the tips above as often as necessary to help you through this season of life, but also remember that Now is NOT Forever!