To reduce adult presence and control, achieving sphincter control should be among the primary goals of any educational program. Acquiring personal autonomy skills is an indispensable goal to ensure independence and inclusion in the community and to improve the quality of life of the person and his/her family.
Usually, sphincter control is acquired around the age of three. Only after this age, in the presence of uncontrolled emission of urine and/or faeces during the day and/or night, can one speak of a deficit in sphincter control. The case of Andrea, on the other hand, a seven-year-old child who is the subject of the present study, is atypical: the child has perfect sphincter control so much so that he retains stools (continence) for several days if his mother, at his request, does not put a nappy on him where he will then evacuate his bowels. The nappy, that is, has become, for the child, the discriminative stimulus for evacuation.
With an intervention based on Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), the authors successfully taught the child how to expel faeces appropriately.