Developing good life skills can be one of the main building blocks for independence. This section contains all blogs, links and articles related to life skills including: toilet training, cooking, and dating among others.
Becoming an independent adult with ASD involves a large skill set that needs to be planned out over the lifetime of your child. I recently posted an article on establishing clear guidelines around sexuality early on. Money management is no different. Being able to pay for items and stick to a budget is a barrier to successful independence. Many people –…
The most frequently asked questions I get tend to be about toileting training the child with ASD. The biggest quandry is knowing when to start the process. In many cases, you can’t use the typically developing child guidelines as these may not apply to a child with developmental delays. Although I have never found a study to confirm this, I feel that language development may be a factor in toilet training/readiness. The more limited the language skills are, the more delayed toilet training is. I am not saying, though, that a child with no verbal skills can’t be toilet trained. Both of my children were late talkers (almost 5 years of age) and both were late toilet trainers. My son was 9.5 years and my daughter 6 years old. They were both trained for uriniation earlier than that, at about age 4, but it was the bowel movement that was the hardest thing to train.
I attended an excellent seminar last night sponsored by the Autism Calgary Association. The guest speaker was Penny Gill, President of the Autism/PDD Family Alliance in Southern Ontario. Her presentation, Overcoming the Challenges: Teaching Someone with Autism Spectrum Disorder to Cook Really Well, showed us that you can teach someone with an ASD the important life skill of cooking provided the challenges are understood and the right supports are in place. Penny runs a cooking school out of her home for people with ASD ages 18 and over. Her eight week sessions work on more than just cooking; her students work on social skills, sensory issues, motor challenges and food aversions.
Making eye contact has been a long debate in the autism community. Eye contact is a necessary skill for navigating social landscapes at work and school. Lack of eye contact is one of the hallmarks of autism, but should we insist on it? Why do children find it difficult to make eye contact? A new study, published in November in…
When you are a parent of a child with an autism spectrum disorder, you worry about the child’s future as an adult. Will they be able to live on their own? What happens if a parent is no longer able to care for their adult child? Canadian psychologist Dr. Lillian Burke believes only 3% of adults with Asperger Syndrome are able to live independently with no support. With this statistic in mind, what services and supports need to be in place to make the transition from the parental home to independent living? Can independent living be an option?
It’s not something that any one of us want to think about, but the question, “what if I got hit by a bus tomorrow?” is one that has plagued my parenting life since giving birth to two children on the spectrum. In fact some years back, I posted a harrowing article about a young woman with autism who was left…
While many of us learn to dislike our chores or household duties, we all like the feeling that we can help! Household chores can be loads of fun especially for younger children who actively look for ways to participate. For those on the spectrum, household chores can be a way to improve or create self-esteem, and ultimately lead towards more…
Teaching independence is a baby steps process that starts at an early age. When working with children with autism on any skill, you have to think it forward. How will this look and function at age 5, 10 or 18? Imagining where you want this person to be as an adult is a good motivator to teach independence skills. It gives a framework to set goals.
There are small, gradual ways to build independence. The foundation of independence is using visual supports. I have written about the effective use of visual supports in a past blog. Visual supports can be used to break down the steps of any task. When the steps are put on a strip, the person with autism now has those for a handy reference. I’ve used this idea for routines like getting dressed, toileting, hand washing and brushing teeth. There are some great ideas for this on the Do2Learn website. Thinking this forward, these tasks strips could be used for doing laundry or dishes.
Happy Autism Awareness Day! This year’s theme is inclusion and neurodiversity. This post was originally published on Judy Endow’s site, and is reposted here in honour of Autism Awareness Day. French Translation: Se faire violence pour « passer sous le radar » de l’autisme http://www.judyendow.com/french-blogs/se-faire/ It is a lot of work to look non-autistic …and yet, looking non-autistic is the ticket to…
Predictability is the ability to know and understand what is coming up next in your day. Many of us feel less anxious when we know what is expected of us, and how we are going to navigate our day to day lives. For someone on the spectrum, where even knowing which washroom to use -unless it is exactly like the one they are used to using at home- can be a major challenge. Predictability is a way for someone on the spectrum to assuage their anxiety over the unknown, and empower themselves into their daily tasks. For some of the spectrum, not knowing what to expect at a new school, in a new restaurant, or while on vacation can make life unbearable for themselves and their caregivers.
There is almost no literature available on training the older child with autism. Traditional children’s books all use the potty chair to teach toilet training. Animated characters on videos do not explain the elimination process or show exactly what to do. It took us nine years to get my son Marc using the toilet on his own, and here is how we did it.
Many autistic adults have difficulty being accepted in, and carving a niche in the working world. While they may have troubles communicating verbally, they might still be able to, and want to contribute in a meaningful way through work. Most provinces in Canada have programs available to help autistic people find work, and there is a growing number of provincial…
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine where our kids will be several years from now. What will their life look like once they leave home? What skills will they need to be successful as an adult? What is a meaningful life for this adult with ASD?
These questions swirl around in my mind all the time. My children aren’t many years away from accessing adult services. I often think of the skills they will need to be successful. Those skills will vary for each child depending on their functioning level.
Feeding a child on the autism spectrum can be a great challenge for parents. Creating healthy meals, eating a variety of foods, eating too little or too much food, focusing on only one texture or food presentation, and gut/digestive issues are just some of the worries parents have when feeding their children. Here are a few helpful hints that I have learned as a mother of two children with autism who are both on specialized diets and struggle with eating.
I am an avid reader of Judy Endow’s blog because she highlights issues that many of us are not even aware of. Her recent post about the differences in self-advocacy if you are poor or middle income was eye-opening.
Judy has been both poor and middle income as an autistic adult and has observed that “self-advocacy is typically geared toward middle-income status. This could be problematic since many autistic adults live in poverty.”