We’ve sat in hundreds of IEP and family consultation meetings to know how often parents and teachers talk about daily living skills. Wanting our teens and young adults with unique learning needs to be more independent is a relatively common and meaningful goal. Too often though, we see that progress on these skills is slow and not always motivating for the learner.
Today, we’re looking at some strategies that might speed up your teen’s progress on daily living skills–and they might surprise you.
Instead of working on the same old IEP goals year after year, it’s time we start talking about how building executive functioning can help your teen with DLS.
Most daily living skills involve executive functioning behaviors. It’s nearly impossible to demonstrate one without the other. Even simple skills like folding laundry and washing dishes require planning, working memory, and organization. We use skills like emotional control, and problem-solving are critical when our learners start navigating the community or learning complex tasks like driving a car.
If we want our children and students to be successful with learning new DLS skills, we should also want them to continue building executive functioning skills.
Need more convincing about how closely related DLS and executive functioning skills are?
Check out our list of primary daily living skills areas and ways that building EF skills can help your teen succeed.
23 Ways Building Executive Functioning Can Help Your Teen with Daily Living Skills
Primary Needs
For most children and teens, learning daily living skills begins with primary needs. These are behaviors that help meet our basic survival needs. They include health (food, water, dressing, exercise), safety (household safety, community safety, and personal safety), and household tasks (cleaning, shopping).
Check out these ways building executive functioning can help build primary DLS:
- Planning: Build planning skills through weekly menu planning, grocery shopping, and teaching simple recipes.
- Time Management: Teach time management skills through morning and bedtime routines, encouraging your teen to finish tasks in a defined time.
- Organization: Work on organization skills in household cleaning tasks, including tidying up, sorting and folding laundry, and organizing belongings.
- Working Memory & Problem Solving: Build your teen’s working memory by teaching simple community and personal safety rules. Help your teen rely on what they know to navigate and problem-solve situations in the community.
- Flexibility: Build flexibility by making changes to daily living routines and helping your learner adjust to unpredictability in the community.
- Impulse & Emotional Control: Help your learner control emotional and impulsive food choices. Teaching these skills also helps learners make better personal safety decisions.
Secondary Needs
As primary daily living skills develop, children and teens also begin to develop the skills to meet secondary needs. These include areas like transportation (driving, using public transportation, navigating maps), career planning (vocational training, goal setting, job search), and personal finance skills (budget management, savings, basic investment).
Check out these ways building executive functioning can help build secondary DLS:
- Planning: Planning a route and transportation options to get from one point to another.
- Working Memory: Help your teen apply their community knowledge to getting around, using public transportation, and navigating personal finances.
- Time Management: Learning to follow transportation schedules and budgeting enough time for traveling to familiar places on a schedule.
- Attentional Control: Developing the attentional control required to drive a car, use a bike, or navigate as a pedestrian in the local community.
- Self-Monitoring: Developing and sticking to a budget to reach a savings goaland developing and setting goals for career and personal life.
- Organization: Staying organized throughout the job search process, including managing application materials, references, and job posting information.
- Task Initiation: Teach your teen how to follow more complex routines and work through each step of a goal that may take longer to achieve (e.g., saving for a high-ticket item, getting the first job, applying to college).
Advanced Skills
Even though primary and secondary DLS represents the most significant number of skills we teach for independent living, advanced skills that enhance our physical and emotional well-being are just as important. These advanced skills are how our teens enjoy leisure and recreation time and practice self-care and stress management.
Check out these ways building executive functioning can help build Advanced DLS:
- Time Management: Budgeting enough time during the week to accomplish homework and chores to allow for leisure and recreation time.
- Planning & Organization: Teaching planning and organization can be fun if it involves the preferred interests of your teen. Have them plan an outing or organize a family event around their favorite hobby or activity.
- Working Memory: Many recreation activities involving music, sports, and video games involve working memory. Build your teen’s capacity to use existing knowledge in a fun setting.
- Attentional & Emotional Control: Activities like yoga and mindfulness meditation build focus and emotional control in teens and young adults.
- Self-Monitoring: As your teen builds independence and takes on more responsibilities, it becomes even more important for them to learn stress management techniques. Build your teen’s skills to self-monitor their stress level.
Advanced+ Skills
Some of the final DLS skills teens and young adults acquire as they move into more independent living involve behaviors that promote full participation as a community member. These include citizenship behaviors (volunteerism, voting, advocacy, and social justice), legal skills (understanding workplace and community laws, navigating legal activities and education rights), and understanding self-advocacy issues like informed consent and self-determination.
These complex skills involve a variety of different executive functioning skills. So even if you aren’t targeting these with your teen yet, here are some ways you can begin to build Advanced+ skills by targeting executive functioning now.
- Planning: Help your teen learn to research and create a plan around the voting regulations in your area, including the registration and local voting process.
- Time Management: Build time management skills to ensure your teen can balance other daily living skills and still have time for community activities like volunteering and advocacy.
- Emotional Control: Develop tools for your teen to understand emotions like empathy, compassion, and injustice to advocate for themselves and others.
- Impulse Control: Work on impulse control behaviors with your teen, including understanding the legal system and consequences for actions that break the law.
- Problem Solving: Build from simple problem-solving up to more complex problem-solving skills to help your teen formulate and take action on social issues that are important to them.
Where to Get Started with Daily Living Skills
If you’ve decided you’re ready to start working on your teen’s daily living and executive functioning skills, the best place to get started is to assess your values.
Values are deeply ingrained principles that guide our actions and decision-making. We consistently behave in ways that match our values. They help us select personal goals, be self-motivated, and achieve positive outcomes. When we align our behaviors with our self-selected values, we tend to identify with the results positively.
As we mentioned in our “The Trouble with Standardized Daily Living Skills Assessments” article, we often don’t formally evaluate values or use values-based decision-making when selecting DLS goals for our students. This can create big disconnects and decrease motivation for our learners and families if they don’t value a particular DLS teaching plan. In addition, DLS skills can take months and years for some learners with diverse needs to reach mastery. If we spend time trying to master DLS targets that aren’t worthwhile to the family or the learner, we’re wasting valuable time that could otherwise be teaching high-priority skills.
Start building EF and DLS Skills with our free Values-Based Decisions Worksheet and help align what matters most between you and your learner.
Further Reading
- Check out our free EF assessment
- Download our Real-Life Executive Functioning Workbook (coupon code LSA20 for 20% off at checkout)
- Executive Functioning 101 Hub
- Helping Your Teen Set SMART Goals Email Course
- Life Skills Advocate: 6 Key Steps For Making Values-Based Decisions For Your Child’s Daily Living Skills