Identifying Life Skills to Target
The first step in identifying what daily living skills you may need to work on with your child or teen is to do an assessment of their strengths and challenges! However, it can be somewhat overwhelming to identify checklists or assessments that fit your needs, yet are also comprehensive enough to increase your understanding of what life skills you need to target!
Here are a few ideas of where to start:
- Capable: The Comprehensive Checklist for Raising Independent Kids – this book has a detailed list of life skills to tackle for toddlers to teenagers.
- There are many checklists available for parents to use to get an idea of skills that need to be taught and then practiced. For older children, it may be beneficial to involve them in looking at the checklist to see if there are life skills that they are motivated to work on!
- Do an informal assessment by observing your child for a few days to see what skills they have mastered and what skills they may need to build. It can be helpful to take a step back and take note of skills that you find yourself reminding them to start or finish and also skills that you may be helping them with. For example, parents could focus on what their child is able to do in the kitchen in terms of preparing and cooking food, making meals, washing dishes, loading and unloading the dishwasher, cleaning the kitchen, making a grocery list, and putting groceries away.
In future blog posts, we will outline a plan to build age appropriate life skills by following the DLS Teaching Method of Instruct – Model – Practice – Do It Independently!
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