Goals For Independent Living Skills - We continue our series on daily life skills. After publishing our article Executive Functioning Skills by Age: What to Look For, many of you asked us for a similar step-by-step guide to everyday life skills. Today is the day! We are posting our daily life skills guide for all ages.
Using a developmental model, we will delve into how we learn and acquire the skills needed to live independently as adults.
Goals For Independent Living Skills
As the title suggests, daily living skills (DLS) are all the behaviors we adopt to be successful and independent in everyday life. Without these skills, we may struggle to make healthy choices and meet our basic needs.
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We all know that human beings are not born knowing how to wash clothes. So how do we develop the daily living skills in these areas that allow us to live independently as adults?
Most researchers subscribe to a developmental model of how we develop everyday life skills. That is, we have the innate genetic ability to develop daily living skills. However, we learn skills through environmental experience. Therefore, if we expect our students to develop skills for everyday life, we must provide the opportunity and, in many cases, specifically teach these skills.
Not all individuals develop daily living skills in the same way. Many teens and young adults with unique learning needs develop some daily living skills but struggle with independence in others. Whether due to diagnosis, language and communication difficulties, low motivation or another learning barrier, basic communication and daily living skills are not strong enough to support more advanced behaviours.
For some diverse students, daily living skills are at a certain stage and do not continue to progress to more complex behaviours. Or, for other learners, they may continue to develop more advanced everyday life skills, but at a much slower pace than we would expect from their peers.
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Regardless, many studies support that these barriers can be overcome. Learning interventions aimed at teaching everyday life skills are well documented in research, including behavioral skills training, schedules and visual aids, and positive reinforcement.
The important thing as parents and teachers of unique students is not to give up. It is always possible to progress towards greater freedom.
Not sure what to expect from your student's daily life skills or if your student's skills are lagging behind in a particular area? Review a summary of each of the daily living skills below. Or download our free printable .pdf chart. Includes a brief description of each area of daily living skills.
Achieving independence with daily living skills starts with a solid foundation of communication. It is difficult to imagine how students with specific needs will acquire skills such as vocational training, financial management or navigating public transport without well-developed communication skills.
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Regardless of how the learner communicates (verbally, visually, adaptively, or a combination of these), help them respond to instructions and share with others. This might mean taking the time to teach proper applications, or new vocabulary, or even communication skills. We often have communication activities involved in working on DLS with a student.
Our students also need a solid foundation of executive functioning skills to successfully tackle other areas of DLS. For example, planning, time management, organization, and attention-management behaviors are often more complex routines and essential skills for learning advanced DLS.
For a detailed look at the model for developing executive functioning skills, review our previous article, "Executive Functioning Skills by Age: What to Look For."
The basic skills of daily living include meeting our basic needs for food, safety, health and housing. As humans, we are one of the few species that needs all of these basic survival needs from birth. It is only at 2-4 years of age that we begin to gain some independence in terms of food, clothing and hygiene.
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Children acquire many of the skills needed to cook, clean and manage their own health and safety in preadolescence and adolescence. They may need frequent reminders from adults and occasional “reinforcements” to generalize skills to new environments. However, on the side of young people, we are
Secondary DLS involves navigating the environment, including academic/professional behaviors, managing finances and transportation. As children, adults support all of these skills, essentially providing us with role models and opportunities to “learn by example”. In addition, young children participate in parts of these skills (for example, paying the cashier for a candy bar) as opportunities arise.
In preadolescence, we begin to perform more and more of these skills without the need for adult help. Throughout adolescence, we provide learning opportunities to meet secondary needs (for example, saving an allowance, using public transportation with friends, helping with yard work, or babysitting for money). But we don't require our students to independently complete these skills, but rather create safe spaces to make mistakes and learn DLS behaviors. We also continued to develop the executive functioning and communication behaviors needed to be independent, along with secondary DLS skills.
By adulthood, we are able to satisfy all of our secondary needs, including identifying and keeping a job, managing finances and household details, and successfully navigating our environment.
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Once teens and young people have mastered meeting basic and secondary needs, we can begin to consider developing advanced DLS skills – or behaviors that support our physical and emotional well-being. This includes hobbies, recreation, leisure time and stress management.
It's strange to think that these attitudes are born in childhood and adolescence, but it's often where we first learn what activities bring us the most joy and happiness. During adolescence and adolescence, we learn different ways to manage stress and establish good habits.
Many parents and teachers spend too much time focusing on primary and secondary ODL areas, but miss the opportunity to teach fun, recreation and stress management skills. However, as adults we know the consequences of too much stress, so it's worth devoting resources to childhood.
Finally, we recognize that part of becoming an independent adult includes being an active participant in our community. Behaviors around citizenship (voting, volunteering, environmental responsibility), legislation and self-advocacy are essential skills we develop as young adults. But many of these skills begin to develop in childhood, when we model them for our students.
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While children and teens may not yet participate in high skills, giving them a basic understanding of the importance of these behaviors and modeling participation in them is an excellent way to ensure they become commonplace in adulthood.
If you've reviewed the Daily Living Skills Chart and decided your student might need some remedial training, check out these resources to get started:
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Amy Sippel is a Minnesota-based Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) and freelance content developer specializing in helping individuals with autism and their families achieve the best possible outcomes. Amy earned her Master's in Applied Behavioral Analysis from St. Cloud State University and also earned a BA in Psychology and Family Social Sciences from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. Amy has worked with children with autism and related developmental disabilities in residential and clinical settings for over a decade. Her content focuses on parents, educators, and professionals in the autism world – emphasizing simple tips and strategies for maximizing success. Visit amysippl.com to see more of her work.
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Please login again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page. There are an endless number of IEP goals for life skills, it's just a matter of figuring out what your student and family want to focus on when it comes to independent living. It's about getting to know your student, their future goals, and collaborating with parents/guardians in the areas they feel are important. Some families have an idea of the types of goals they want to work on, while others can rely on their teacher's suggestions (after all, you're the expert!) Although sometimes it's easier to leave a blank, so I'm here to help. Here are some ideas to get you started. If you find an objective that you like, be aware that there are many different ways to write an objective to suit each student's needs, depending on what you specifically want.
** Not all targets need to have each of these components, it just depends on the target, what you are measuring and where.
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