#5 Creating a Structured Home Environment and Teaching Adaptive Life Skills

Daily life skills such as hygiene, dressing, and household chores can be challenging for families of children with autism or other developmental disability. This workshop will help participants utilize the principles of applied behavior analysis (ABA) to teach adaptive life skills in the home, with the primary goal being to foster independence. Meal time is also a common concern of parents of children with autism. This workshop will provide guidelines for using reinforcement-based strategies to decrease the food refusal in selective eaters. In addition, a toilet training protocol adapted from Foxx and Azrin will be reviewed, as well as various modifications that can be made based upon individual cognitive or physical issues. Specifically, this workshop will provide parents & caregivers with the following:

• Criteria for selecting developmentally appropriate skills
• Steps to creating a task analysis for a targeted skill
• Definitions of teaching procedures such as forward & backward chaining
• Suggested prompting techniques such as graduated guidance & fading as opposed to vocal prompting
• Strategies for data collection
• Guidelines for utilizing escape extinction for off-task behaviors