I am trying to teach my son self-help skills such as getting himself dressed in the morning and washing himself. Any tips?

There are two main ways to teach self-help skills:

  • forward chaining: teaches a skill in small steps from the first activity,  ie to get dressed in the morning, first you put on your pants, then your socks, etc
  • backward chaining: starts at the last step and works backwards through the activity, ie once your son has brushed his teeth, move backwards through each step slowly.

Whichever you decide to use for your son, make sure the activity is broken down into the smallest steps possible.

Prompts

You may also want to use prompts to help your son learn self-help skills. For instance, if you are trying to teach him to wash his hands, you could use the below prompts in the following order:

  • physical: hold his hands and wash your hands together
  • gestural: mime washing your hands next to your son while he washes his own hands
  • verbal: say "wash your hands" or show him a ‘wash hands’ symbol, which you can leave above the sink as a prompt for next time.

It is important to remove the prompts as quickly as possible, which can be more easily done by providing rewards when your son does a step correctly, ie when he washes his hands when prompted he gets a small reward immediately afterwards.

Give your son the reward directly after the desired behaviour so that he makes the connection between the two, and make sure the reward is meaningful to your son (May, 2005).

Symbols

You may find that you need to leave physical reminders of each activity in the appropriate room permanently, for example, symbols, or written lists of all the different steps for brushing teeth in the bathroom and the same thing for getting dressed in his bedroom. You can download free symbols from the following websites:

- www.do2learn.com
- www.symbolworld.org
- www.enchantedlearning.com/dictionary
- www.pdictionary.com
- www.trainland.tripod.com/pecs