Developing a Child’s Self Help & Self Care Skills to Promote Increased Independence & Functional Performance
Routine developmental milestones can often involve monumental challenges
Self-help skills for children can range from the basic, routine, daily living skills of bathing, dressing, and grooming, to cleaning their rooms, fixing simple meals and snacks, and helping around the house.
The ability to perform these routine daily tasks are often taken for granted, and expected as a “normal” part of growing up. All these skills require the development, growth and learning involving very precise and complex neurological processes.
For neuro-typical children, the development of these skills takes place through normal patterns of development which are usually experienced through the everyday play and work of children.
For children with sensory integrative deficits, or children with developmental delays, routine developmental milestones can involve monumental challenges to both the child and the entire family.
Even very young children will try to help dress themselves. Maybe it is just putting out their arms or holding a leg up to help you put their clothes on, but they do start to help at a very young age. The more your child can do to participate, the more time you have to manage other things!
Participating in their own self-care and basic home tasks, help a child learn responsibility, learn functional skills, become more confident, and learn the sense and security of family, while they develop a consistent daily routine.
For children with any kind of sensory processing disorder, the whole process of working toward basic self-care independence can take an extended time, and be filled with stress, anxiety, fear, and lots of frustration. This book covers “normal” development of basic self-care and self-help skills, modified to promote early participation and learning from an early age for children with SPD’s or developmental delay.
This book, “Developing a Child’s Self Help & Self Care Skills to Promote Increased Independence & Functional Performance,” written by an Occupational Therapist, will cover:
Introduction to Self Care and Home Activities
Challenges to Development of Basic Self Care and Self Help Skills
Examples of Impact of Self Care and Self Help Delays
Self Care Dressing Skills and Development
Required Skills for Self Care Dressing Performance
OT Dressing Tasks and Activity Ideas
Self Help Dressing Games
Self Care Toileting Skills and Development
Toilet Training and Toileting Readiness
Self Help Toileting and Hand Washing / Hygiene
Reducing Fears and Anxiety with Using the Bathroom
Self Help Home Tasks – Developing Ability to Help Around the House
Author, Judy Benz Duncan has been an Occupational Therapist for over thirty years. She has worked with children from infants to teenagers in numerous settings that included early intervention, pre-school programs, grade school, home health, developmental training centers, and sensory integration clinics.
Judy developed the foundation for designing therapeutic activities and tasks using interactive play and creative imagination to engage the children at a level they could easily relate to while working toward the achievement of their Occupational Therapy program’s functional goals and treatment plan
Judy attended the University of Florida, University of Kansas, and the University of Tennessee. She received New York State approval as a Supplemental Evaluator for OT with early intervention and pre-school students, and has helped develop and start an OT program for families and children in New York. Judy continues to stay up-to-date in the clinical field through mentoring other OT students and new graduates.
She continues to contribute to children, families and professionals everywhere through her professional writing endeavors which include writing books and manuals, managing the therapeutic website, TheraPlay4Kids.com, writing OT blogs and topic-specific articles, working on "interactive story play" book series, writing bi-weekly professional blogs for a pediatric orthopedic surgeon group, a psychiatrist, and an attorney at law. She continues to be an active mentor of new OT graduates, as well as OT students.
