If you’re stopping to read this article, chances are you’re working with your child or student on building daily living skills (DLS). What skills are most important right now? Choose one of the daily living skills you’d like your student to learn or improve.
Driving a car.
Ordering at a restaurant.
Balancing personal finances.
Now imagine how you might go about teaching your learner this skill. In some form or another, you’ll need to use communication. As much as we’d like it to, learning new skills doesn’t happen through osmosis or some magical wavelength. It happens through communication.
Communication forms the foundation of building other daily living skills. Without working on your child or learner’s ability to communicate effectively, you may be short-changing the success of learning more complex skills.
Here’s why:
5 Reasons Building Communication Skills is Key to Building DLS
Communication is how we learn new skills
As mentioned above, communication is how we support interactions with others in our environment. It’s also one of the primary ways we learn new skills. For example, consider the skill of learning to navigate public transportation.
Depending on the learner, you might use many different forms of communication to teach the skill:
- Receptive: Giving instructions on how to purchase a ticket, board the train, or social norms about ridership.
- Expressive: Asking your learner questions to gauge their comprehension or having your learner ask for help or directions.
- Written Communication: Reviewing transportation schedules, purchasing a ticket at a kiosk.
- Non-verbal Communication: Following the non-verbal cues of others to board at the right time, where to sit, and respecting personal space.
Now consider a learner that struggles in any of these communication areas. While it’s not impossible to teach the skill, it indeed becomes more challenging. Taking the time to build receptive, expressive, non-verbal, and written communication outside of teaching DLS can make a big difference in later success.
Receptive (Listen and Do) Communication is foundational independent living
Research shows that without receptive communication skills (or how we listen to instructions and then follow them), your learner will likely struggle with many of the DLS required for independent living. As much as we like to believe that our world is about the freedom of expression, it’s built primarily on a society of understanding rules and following them.
Daily routines like getting to work or school, navigating social friendships and dating, and maintaining a household rely on our ability to intake information and act upon it successfully.
Contextual communication allows successful navigation in the community
Contextual communication, or using different communication skills in various settings, is another skill that comes hand in hand with teaching DLS. For example, how we want our teens to communicate in a football stadium differs from communicating with the clerk at the local library. As parents and teachers, we must ask ourselves, what good would it do to focus on football games and library outings but not teach the communication norms that go along with those environments?
Teens with unique learning needs may not consistently develop contextual communication through natural learning opportunities. In many ways, these setting-specific norms follow cultural beliefs, and they don’t often follow logic. So be prepared–your learner may need specific teaching on the communication norms along with teaching the DLS.
Communication issues may disrupt executive functioning and create challenging behaviors
As the graphic above indicates, communication skills form the foundational block for DLS. Stacked immediately on top of communication skills are the beginnings of executive functioning skills like planning, time management, and emotional control. Mastering these skills is critical to independent living and ‘higher order’ DLS.
Breakdown in executive functioning behaviors can often be traced back to underdeveloped communication skills. When we see a breakdown in executive functioning and communication, we may also see challenging behaviors emerge.
For more info in challenging behavior, communication, and executive functioning, see: How Teaching Executive Functioning Skills Can Reduce Challenging Behaviors.
True independence comes with communicating thoughts, ideas, needs, and wants
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, ensuring your learner can also communicate guarantees they have the greatest chance at independence. Effectively sharing thoughts, ideas, needs, and wants with others builds safety and builds autonomy.
We all want our children and students to live happy, meaningful, and fulfilling lives. Skipping out on communication skills means we’re potentially short-changing our learners from reaching their full potential.
How to Get Started with Building Communication
After reviewing the info above, have you decided it’s time to start building your learner’s communication skills? Unsure where to start or how to know what skills your learner needs to work on the most?
Download our free .pdf values-based assessment for communication skills. It will help you evaluate and make an informed decision about how to start working on communication and DLS with your child or student.
Further Reading
- How Teaching Executive Functioning Skills Can Reduce Challenging Behaviors – Life Skills Advocate Blog
- Receptive Language Milestones for Teenagers 13-18 years – SLT for Kids
- Social Communication and Language Characteristics Associated with High Functioning, Verbal Children and Adults with ASD – Indiana University