Some Helpful Tips and Rules for Parents
At Taarana, we strive to help parents with special needs children by nurturing them with lifelong skills in hopes to help them make a smooth transition into society and lead meaningful lives. With the help of our experienced teachers, we share with you these tips in raising your child.
- Some skills are essential or pre-requisite for learning further skills such as toileting, self-help skills, attending skills etc. Make sure these skills are taught so they can lead an independent life.
- Have clear expectations. Convey it to the child explicitly with pictures, words, signs or any other mode that the child will understand.
- Create opportunities to encourage child-centred communication.
- Have a structured time at home too. Follow the schedule while intermittently changing the activities to teach flexibility.
- Allow downtime or leisure time. Create or teach them leisure activities.
- Make sure the leisure activities are timed as our children tend to go overboard sometimes. For example, TV time, computer time etc.
- The child learns better from hands on experience or natural environmental teaching. Take them out. Engage with them. Have fun. Have a bond and interact with them at any given opportunity.
- Break teaching into small components. One step at a time. Praise and encourage for small achievements. Positive reinforcement works best.
- Use specific words to give instructions. Too many words will confuse the child.
- Analyse what you are targeting to teach is a realistic, functional skill.
- Notice the progress and note it down regularly. You will be amazed to see the small steady progress your child is making.
- If you think the child has not progressed, change strategies or teaching methodology to accommodate the child’s learning.
- Try errorless teaching. What is it? It is guaranteeing that my child does not fail at a given task by helping him along until my help is no longer necessary. It is about providing prompts.
- Fade prompts. What is it? As my child shows that he is beginning to understand what is expected of him, I need to slowly reduce the help I have been giving.
- Consistency is the key to success. Never give up. We all together can bring in progress.