Self-help skills (also known as self-care skills, independent skills, daily living, or life skills) are basic everyday skills that a person needs to have in order to live independently. Typically developing children pick up self-help skills readily through daily exposure to their routines at school or in their homes. Although they might need some level of support from school teachers or their caregivers, most of them do reach a level of independence in these daily living skills as they mature.
Examples of these self-help skills include: eating, getting dressed, brushing teeth, going to the toilet, etc.
Why do children with autism have difficulties learning self-help skills?
On the other hand, children with Autism face learning difficulties due to various factors e.g. poor language and understanding, interfering self-stimulatory behaviors, inability to sustain attention, etc. As a result, most of them do not acquire self-help skills in the same way as their peers.
Therefore, parents, caregivers, and teachers might find themselves having to facilitate many aspects of their child’s daily life routines to get by day to day. This reduces your child’s level of independence and can also be exhausting for the caregivers, both physically and mentally.
This table gives a good overview of the self-help skills that children should be able to do with some assistance from adults according to their age.
First, self-help skills work on developing your child’s memory and sustained attending due to the nature of the skill. As most self-help skills consist of multiple steps over a duration of time, your child is required to remember the sequence of the skill, consistently pay attention in order to remember which step of the self-help skill he is on, and move on to the next step accurately.
For example, when your child is learning how to dress himself, he needs to remember to put on his underwear, followed by his pants. Likewise, for showering, your child needs to remember to pump shampoo to apply it to his hair, before performing the steps to wash his hair. All these work on the sustaining of attention and memory which is highly important for any developing child.
Also, self-help skills also encourage the organization of your child’s thought process, which is an important skill for developing your child’s executive functioning. When your child performs a self-help skill like packing his bag, he will need to plan what is required to go into the bag according to what he needs for the day, as well as where the items are kept in order for him to retrieve them for packing.
If your child is following a packing list, he will need to be systematic and organized in going down the list to make sure he packs everything into his bag. All these work on the planning and organization of your child which is pivotal in his development and journey to independence.
The skill should be developmentally appropriate for your child.
Break the skill down into smaller parts according to your child’s ability. Every child learns differently and there will be no one size fits all method to break down a skill.
Start teaching the skill 1 step at a time and add on an additional step each time your child masters the previous step. You can start teaching either from the first step of the skill (forward chaining) or the last step of the skill (backward chaining) depending on the learning style of your child.
Help your child by using prompts to speed up the learning process and reduce your child’s level of frustration. Pick a prompt that plays on your child’s strength.
Have enough repeated practice so that your child is able to remember the steps of the skill. Reinforce your child to maintain your child’s motivation level in order for skill acquisition to occur.
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