Are you interested in learning more about how you can use self-management to teach healthy living skills to your child? You’re in the right place.
We all know how important life skills are in the context of preparing your child with unique learning needs for independent adulthood.
From learning how to manage a bank account to navigating grocery shopping, there are all sorts of things that your child will need to know how to do in order to be successful.
Unfortunately, healthy living skills often fall by the wayside in favor of more “pragmatic” skills. We might gloss over the importance of exercise and healthy eating in favor of budgeting and learning how to drive a car.
However, healthy living skills are essential and teaching your child these skills will set them up for lifelong success. By using self-management to teach healthy living skills, you can teach your child how to manage stress while also finding the motivation to meet a specific health goal.
Here’s what you need to know.
What is Self-Management?
Self-management is something that’s important for children and adults alike.
Being able to manage yourself, both in terms of your actions, decisions, and thoughts, can help improve your academic performance, time present on task, productivity, and more. It can also decrease problem behaviors.
Teaching self-management to your child starts before issues arise, but self-management can also be used later on. It can also be used as a technique to teach new skills, such as healthy living skills.
The ideal self-management plan exists as a set of tools to help foster independence, motivation, and self-reliance. It only makes sense that self-management can be used to foster healthy living skills such as making healthy food choices, exercising, and maintaining proper hygiene.
What Are Some Important Self-Management Strategies?
Before we dive into all the healthy living skills that can be taught with good self-management, let’s first discuss the strategies that can be used to do so.
Goal Setting
Knowing how to set, work toward, and evaluate the progress of goals is an effective self-management strategy that can be hugely beneficial in teaching healthy living skills.
Make sure our child is an active participant in goal setting and don’t just set goals for him. You might want him to start exercising for half an hour a day but that could be unrealistic – he might need to start smaller than that based on his own goals.
Use SMART goals to help teach your child the process of setting and measuring attainable goals.
Self-Reinforcement
Self-reinforcement is rewarding oneself after completing a behavior or meeting a goal.
While it’s great to offer your child rewards and positive reinforcement for doing things correctly, he won’t become independent unless he learns how to self-reinforce.
Learning self-reinforcement can help improve a child’s self-esteem and will increase the likelihood of other healthy behaviors being started and continued in the future.
Self-Evaluation
Looking forward to rewards is one thing but being able to reflect on the process is even more influential. It is important for our child to understand what parts of the healthy living process were challenging and to evaluate whether the reward was worth it.
For example, evaluating the act of healthy eating could look like, “Yes, it was challenging to pick the banana instead of the candy bar. However, I had so much more energy later in the day so that was worth the extra effort.”
This is something that will likely need to be done with you at first but over time you can teach your child helpful ways to reflect back on what they’ve accomplished – all on their own.
Behavior Monitoring
This self-management strategy is especially helpful in the context of teaching healthy living skills related to mental and emotional health but can really be used for all aspects. Behavior monitoring, or self-monitoring, occurs when a child is able to observe and record his behavior before redirecting as necessary.
This kind of monitoring helps build self-awareness and self-control. When you are first teaching your child how to use self-management to teach healthy living skills, you may need to use physical items like checklists and charts to stay on track. As your child gets better at monitoring and adjusting his own behavior, he likely won’t need to rely on these as much.
What Healthy Living Skills Should You Teach Your Child?
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines life skills as “abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.”
There are several healthy living skills that should be taught to children with unique learning needs. While many of these are skills that even we, as adults, do not yet have mastery of, they are essential for healthy, independent living.
Teaching self-management skills to individuals with unique learning needs is essential because often, understanding “rules” for various situations can be challenging for these individuals.
Hygiene
Hygiene is something that many children – even those without unique learning needs – struggle with. For a child with diverse needs, it becomes even more challenging. You may have to spell out every aspect of personal hygiene, sometimes using a combination of things like social stories or checklists for constant reinforcement.
Some healthy living skills that will need to be taught include:
- Brushing teeth
- Washing hair, face, and body
- Changing clothes (particularly undergarments)
- Shaving and applying deodorant
Nutrition
If you’ve ever fought with your child to get him to eat his fruits and vegetables, you aren’t alone! Children – and particularly children with unique learning needs – are notorious for having poor or picky appetites.
Teaching about the benefits of fruits and vegetables and other nutritious foods is important. Rather than forcing your child to eat certain foods, teaching them how to take charge of their own diet and cook their own nutritious food is a self-management strategy that can really work.
Exercise
From swimming to joining a sports team, there are all kinds of exercises you can do to stay healthy. However, for many individuals with unique learning needs, getting enough exercise is a challenge – particularly if it involves social demands.
When a child does not see the purpose or benefits of exercise, he is going to be reluctant to engage in it. Teaching your child this healthy living skill in the context of self-management can be life-changing.
A child who has learned how to become independent knows that there are many types of exercise and that it’s important to keep trying new options to find one that he enjoys. He will try different techniques that he knows will work for him, such as using headphones in the gym to block out social distractions and noses.
Medical Appointments
There are many potential challenges in teaching your child healthy living skills related to making and attending doctors and dentist’s appointments.
However, these skills are absolutely necessary. For your child to be completely independent, he will need to understand the importance of going to these appointments as well as how to schedule them.
Self-management is key here, since your child will need to have the motivation and self-reliance necessary to do so.
Mental and Emotional Health
Finally, mental and emotional health are two other healthy living skills that can be taught within the context of self-management.
Your child can be taught important questions like, “how does this make me feel?” “What can I do to feel better?” “How can I react to this situation?”
Using self-management to monitor one’s mental and emotional health is crucial.
What Are Some Self-Management Tools That Can Be Used in the Context of Healthy Living?
There are a variety of self-management tools that can be used to help teach healthy living skills.
Time Management Logs
For example, you might include time management logs. These will help students track and manage their time and can help them work toward specific habits. These logs can be created with a timeline of a day, a week, or longer.
Checklists and Rubrics
You can also use checklists and rubrics. While your child likely won’t need to rely on checklists to remind him of the steps of brushing his teeth when he’s a teenager or young adult, they can be helpful in getting a child started on the right track toward a healthy goal. Rubrics can often serve a similar purpose.
Assessments
When you’re trying to teach self-management as it relates to rewards and self-regulation, you might want to use rating scales. Rating scales can help an individual determine whether a goal was successfully met, and to what extent. Contracts or behavioral agreements can also be effective, though you should slowly reduce the use of these if your goal is self-management since you want your child to rely on him instead of on you.
Data Collection
The same goes for data collection sheets. We have an example of a data collection sheet that you can take a look at here. This can be incredibly helpful to use with your child as you’re first getting started with developing healthy living skills – and eventually, your child can transition to using the sheets on his own to self-manage his own behaviors.
Click below for a free .pdf download of our data collection sheets to use for behavior monitoring.
Incorporating Healthy Life Skills Activities
In addition to the healthy life skills activities described above that make use of self-management strategies, there are several other ways you can teach your child the life skills for healthy living that he needs to know.
For one, make sure you incorporate self-esteem and self-determination concepts. It’s not enough to teach your child how to live a healthy life but also to demonstrate to him why it is so important. Focus on your child’s strengths rather than his weaknesses as you work on these activities.
Provide plenty of opportunities to apply these life skills to real-world scenarios, using teachers, family members, and especially peers as role models to reinforce the skills. Follow up often on the skills you’ve taught your child and monitor your child’s success as you move forward.
A healthy adult begins with a healthy child – and ideally, that’s a child who has the skills necessary to look after his own health and wellbeing independently.
Further Reading
- EF 101 Hub
- Free EF Assessment
- The Real-Life Executive Functioning Workbook (coupon code LSA20 for 20% off at checkout)
- Minnesota Department of Health: PREP – Healthy Life Skills
- Mary Flory: Self Management in Individuals With ASD
- Life Skills Advocate Blog: Self-Monitoring 101
- Life Skills Advocate Blog: 6 Steps to Help Your Child Develop a Strong “Why” When Goal Setting
- Life Skills Advocate Blog: How Teaching Executive Functioning Skills Can Reduce Challenging Behaviors