Teaching Personal Care Skills to Young Children with Disabilities: Task Analysis
For parents of children with disabilities—physical or developmental—even the simplest things, like teaching your child how to zip a zipper or brush their teeth needs to be taught differently. Self care skills include a number of things from tying shoes to getting dressed to bathing to feeding one’s self to a number of other skills. Most people catch on to these sorts of things rather quickly so we take for granted the need to teach them. However, for children with disabilities these functions can take extra effort.
Articles on everything from teeth-brushing to toilet training discuss the importance of task analysis. This is simply jargon for breaking things down into steps. It is important, though. You may have parents believing you don't understand their concerns when you tell them that their child is not yet ready for toilet training. One honest answer to these parents is:
'"We will begin working on steps to toilet training with your child. These include being able to communicate with us and tell us when he needs something and being able to take off his own clothes. "
If you first break the task down into steps, it will make learning self-care easier for any child. For example
When teaching her to brush her teeth:
- Emphasize that first you get out your toothbrush.
- Then you put toothpaste on it and run it under water.
- Then you put the toothbrush in your mouth and move it back and forth and back and forth.
- Then spit.
