Welcome to EP
Special Needs Bookstore!

Learning self-help skills--eating, dressing, toileting, and personal hygiene--can be challenging for people with autism, but is essential for independence. Self-Help Skills for People with Autism thoroughly describes a systematic approach that parents (and educators) can use to teach basic self-care to children, ages 24 months to early teens, and even older individuals. With an encouraging tone, the authors--behavior analysts and psychologists--emphasize that it's worthwhile to devote the extra time and effort now to teach skills rather than have your child be dependent on others.

The many case studies throughout Self-Help Skills depict individuals with deficits in specific self-care tasks, and demonstrate how a coordinated and systematic approach is effective in teaching more complex skills. For example, a 12-year-old with the self-feeding skills of a toddler, who was excluded from the school cafeteria, is taught to stay at the table to eat a full meal using utensils. The book's beginning chapters explain the teaching process in detail:

• Specify the target skill to be taught after prioritizing the self-care tasks that are most important and will likely have the greatest success rate
• Use task analysis to break complex skills into a series of small steps that will later be linked together to form the more complex skill
• Apply a systematic approach to instruction that consistently employs proven methods for teaching people with autism including verbal prompting, reinforcers/rewards, chaining, graduated guidance, shaping, modeling, visual supports, etc.
• Monitor progress by collecting and analyzing data
• Modify your approach as needed to achieve the target goal