How To Teach An Autistic Child To Dress

Getting Dressed: Teaching The Steps Backwards

A good way to teach your child how to get dressed is to break down each task into small steps and teach her the last step first. Once your child can do the last step of the task, teach her the second-last step, then the third-last step and so on.

For example, when putting on shorts, you might help your child face the shorts the right way, hold the waistband and put his legs through the leg holes. Then teach your child the last step pulling up the shorts to his waist by himself.

Once your child can do this, teach her to put her legs through the leg holes and pull her shorts up. You can keep working your way backwards through the steps until your child has mastered them all and can put her shorts on for herself.

A big advantage of this approach is that often the most rewarding thing about a task is getting it finished and your child gets to this reward sooner when he can do the last step first.

If your child is having trouble, it can be tempting to jump in to help. But give your child a chance to work it out for herself, and cheer her on as she tries shell get a real confidence boost when she does it on her own. Step in only when your child really needs your help.

How To Teach Your Child With Special Needs To Dress Independently

Disabilities can make getting dressed independently difficult for your child. These skills can take longer to develop than for other children their age. In fact, your child might always need some assistance. But if youre ready to teach them to do as much as possible by themselves, these tips will help.

Dressing With Low Vision And Blindness

Starting when your child is an infant, narrate the dressing and undressing process as you go, Now Im taki1ng off your socks. When you start to teach independent dressing, use the hand under hand or hand over hand technique.

Hand Under Hand

You perform the action and your childs hands rest on top of yours. This is great in the beginning stages so your child can get used to the movements and motions.

Its also a good way to teach shoe tying. Be sure to stick to a consistent method and describe what you are doing as you go. Have your child sit next to you so the perspective is correct.

Hand Over Hand

As your child starts to become proficient, you can switch to this method. Here, your child is the one doing the actions and your hands are over theirs to guide as necessary. This lets them start to get dressed independently, with help when needed.

The Importance of Organization

Once your child can get dressed alone, organization becomes very important. Put only one to two types of clothing in a drawer, like socks and underwear, or t-shirts and sweaters. You can use drawer dividers to help separate them. Separate clothes in the closet, too. This makes it easier for your child to pick their own clothes.

Use ice cube trays, small boxes, or bags to separate jewelry, hair ties, and accessories.

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Seven Toilet Training Tips That Help Nonverbal Kids With Autism

Todays Got Questions? answer is by psychologists Courtney Aponte and Daniel Mruzek, of the University of Rochester Medical Center, one of 14 sites in the Autism Speaks Autism Treatment Network.

We’re looking for help toilet training our 7 year old. He is very limited verbally.

Great question! Many children with autism take longer than is typical to learn how to use the toilet. This delay can stem from a variety of reasons.

• Many children with autism have a general developmental delay. That is, they simply learn new skills more slowly than other children do.
• Many children who have autism have great difficulty breaking long-established routines in this case using a diaper. Plus, there are relatively few opportunities to practice toileting during the day, as there are only so many times a child genuinely needs to go.
• Communication challenges such as your sons limited verbal abilities clearly add to the challenge for many children on the autism spectrum.
• Its also common for children with autism to develop anxiety around toileting.

For example, some children with communication challenges wont understand the question Do you need to you use the bathroom now? Or they may not know how to respond to it or otherwise signal that they need to use the toilet.

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Things To Consider And Ideas For Home

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Teaching Children With Disability Or Developmental Delay To Get Dressed

Some children with disability or developmental delays can have trouble getting dressed. Some children with autism spectrum disorder have sensory sensitivities that make it hard for them to cope with the texture of different materials on their skin.

If youre having trouble teaching your child with disability or development delay to get dressed, an occupational therapist who works specifically with children might be able to help. OTs can give you strategies to teach your child to dress, or suggest equipment that can make the process easier.

Match Buttons To Holes

Small hands and fiddly buttons can make the fastening of a shirt quite confusing and time-consuming. While it is reasonable to want to intervene and do it for them, there are other ways to help your child get to grip with buttons. Using a discreet mark with a fabric pen, align both sides of the shirt. Place one line next to the button and on the inside of the shirt against the edge of the buttonhole stitching. This useful hidden guideline helps your child match up the button to its hole with ease.

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Tips For Helping Your Child Learn To Get Dressed

If you can be positive and supportive, your child is more likely to cooperate. So a lot of praise will go a long way, even if your child has put his pants on backwards! Here are some practical tips to help.

Making time

• Allow a realistic amount of time for getting dressed.
• If youre often rushed in the morning, try choosing clothes with your child the night before.
• When youre in a hurry, let your child do the easy tasks and help her with the difficult tasks.
• Practise getting dressed when you and your child arent in a hurry or tired.

Choosing appropriate clothes

• Let your younger child choose from a couple of options, like two t-shirts. Older or more mature children might be able to choose their own clothing.
• Talk about the weather when you and your child are choosing clothes. Ask your child whether its hot or cold, raining or sunny.
• Teach your child the difference between dirty and clean clothes for example, Dirty clothes go in the laundry basket. You can wear them again when theyre back in the drawer. You can use some simple guidelines, like wearing clean underwear and socks every day.

Making it easier

Tying up shoelaces is a skill that most five-year-olds are still learning. Our handy illustrated guide to tying shoelaces outlines some easy steps for teaching your child this skill.

Weight Of The Clothing

Pay attention to the time of year is your child more bothered by heavy winter clothes or light summer clothes? Is there a way you can take away layers or add layers in textures of clothes that your child still prefers?

When children are bothered by the feeling of their clothes they may constantly tag or pull at their clothes. They may have difficulty needing to change clothes through out the day such as for swimming lessons or after getting dirty. If you child does become bothered by changing clothes, try to limit the number of times they will need to change their clothes. Also shopping for new clothes may cause a lot of stress. See if you can do more shopping online where they have free returns so you dont have to cause too much stress for your family.

Children can also have visual and auditory preferences with clothing and this is something to consider.

If your child becomes very irritated by the clothing texture, see if you can find textures of clothes that they are more comfortable in. Dont force them to wear clothes that they really dislike wearing.

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Discussion Questions & Worksheets

Following direct instruction with social stories, you can facilitate a keeping clothes on. A staff discussion page, student participation sticks and student response worksheets are all included with 10 yes/no questions. Teachers are able to add to these questions how they see fit for their kids needs or to elaborate to require more than a yes/no answer.

Also included are student response sticks. Teach students to simply raise the yes/no stick to answer the question. There are two levels to these sticks to make for easy differentiation within your classroom:

Find A Physical Solution

If neither accommodation nor behavioral modification is successful , you may need to find a physical way to keep your child from stripping down.

Bottom line, you may need to make it physically impossible for your child to get his clothes off. To do this, you’ll need to choose and/or modify clothing so that it is difficult or impossible to remove. A few examples:

• Put all fasteners in back so that your child cant reach them.
• Buy footed outfits and put them on backward.
• Buy union suit style undergarments and put them on backward.
• Modify zippers so that they cant be easily unzipped .
• Replace snaps with more complex or sturdier fasteners.
• Dress your child in layers so that its harder to strip.

The good news is that the vast majority of children, with autism or without, do learn to keep their clothes on. Meanwhile, give these solutions a try.

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Developing A Toileting Routine

Remember that independent toileting is the ultimate aim and may take many months but there will be many small steps and successes along the way. As well as physical factors associated with toilet training, there are social factors to consider. It is rare for an autisticchild to have the social motivation to want to be like mummy/daddy/friend and use the toilet. After using nappies for a number of years, your child might not see the point in starting to use the toilet. It’s important to remember that all children are different and they will not all respond to the same teaching techniques.

Children on the autism spectrum often like routine. You can build upon this desire for predictability to develop a successful toilet training routine.

Dressing Skills & Hyperlexia: 30 Tips & Strategies To Try

1. Label bins and drawers so your child knows where to find socks, underwear, etc. You can use just words, just pictures, or pictures paired with words. You could also include notes about when to wear certain clothing right on the labels.

2. Use a visual schedule, chart, or checklist that outlines what clothing your child needs to wear. You can always just write this down on a whiteboard each morning or use this blank routine chart.

3. Explicitly teach them how to pick clothing that’s appropriate for the weather, season, and/or occasion. This free choosing what to wear social story can help.

4. Opt for loose clothing that is easy to put on. That means skip the skinny jeans, anything with snaps or buttons, or things with zippers or belts. Instead, focus on clothing that will build your child’s confidence because they’re easy to put on. Basically, pick less complicated clothing options and consider outdoor gear too .

5. Use socks that have colored heels so your child can easily tell which way the socks go. The colored heel acts as a visual cue.

6. Explicitly teach them how to find the tag so they know which is the front or back and which is the inside or outside.

7. Label clothing and shoes with words like front, back, left, or right so they know which way the clothing should be worn.

9. Have them get dressed in front of a mirror so they can see what is happening. This tip works great for buttoning up shirts too.

10. Start by teaching them how to undress first.

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Tips To Teach Sequencing:

• Use pictures at the initial stage because children would be able to learn the concept quickly and easily from pictures than from words.
• Concisely explain the event/task.
• Start from a simple and clear picture which has 2 steps that explain an event in one direction only

For instance,1.) Describing before and after.2.) What comes next?

Then, gradually improve the task which has up to 3 steps.

For example,2.) Blowing Balloon

• Next, move on to the 4 step task and so on.
• While teaching a task that has more than 4 steps, it would be effective to use numbers under each step/picture so that the child would remember better by following the number sequence.

• After that, when the child masters the skill, include monosyllable or bi-syllable words or simple sentences related to the picture depending on the childs age-appropriate cognitive development. For example, planting

• To make the activity complex, jumble up the picture cards and ask the child to re-arrange in an orderly or sequential manner. While doing so, remember not to include numbers anywhere in the picture for this particular activity.

• Likewise, using the shape beads, a sequencing concept can be taught.
• Teaching sequence might be challenging for parents and for the child to learn as well, but a consistent practice in a fun and interesting way would help to achieve the set goals.

Dont forget to download and learn from the worksheets.

Dr. S. Vishnu Priya

Gross Motor Skills And Dressing Skills By Age

Independent dressing skills require higher level gross motor skills to complete. The developmental milestones of dressing skills occur along a continuum. A child moves along the developmental stages gradually learning the gross motor skills needed to undress and dress.

At about 12 months of age, a child will extend his foot or arm to go into a pant leg, shoe or sleeve. The child needs to range of motion in the muscles and joints to complete this skill.

At around 18 months, a child has the balance and postural control to sit unsupported and use his/her hands for other tasks. The child can reach and pull off socks and possibly shoes if unlaced. The child can again maintain the postural control to reach overhead to remove or place a hat on his/her head.

At around 24 months, a child can coordinate both sides of the body to unzip and remove shoes. These skills require the ability to bring the hands to midline, maintain postural control and balance in sitting.

Around 4 to 6 years old, children will be able to dress and undress independently, including understanding directionality of the clothing and shoes .

Therefore, for complete independence with dressing skills, a task analysis of dressing indicates the child must be able to:

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Why Do Some Children Have Clothing Sensitivities

All people process sensory information in their own way. It is why some of us like spicy foods while others want nothing to do with the heat. Some people enjoy rock concerts and others cant stand to be around all that racket. Our sensory systems have a tough job to do. They help us sort through all of the incoming information that our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin help to capture. The sensory system plays a role in modulating some of that information, meaning it helps the information that seems important to stand out while blurring other information into the background. It also plays a role in habituation- learning that there isnt a need to respond to certain ongoing sensory information, such as the way our clothes feel throughout the day. The unique way an individual processes sensory information can cause them to sometimes be hypersensitive or hyposensitivite . Our perception of the world around us directly influences our behaviours and emotions.

Children with clothing sensitivity fall into the hypersensitive category. The feel of clothing can be very irritating for these children. Because of difficulties with modulation and habituation, the feeling of the clothing stays in the forefront of their mind and they do not get used to the feeling over time. Furthermore, children with autism can sometimes have difficulty with temperature regulation, meaning what feels hot or cold to you, may not feel uncomfortable to your child, and vice versa.