Utah just passed the first “free-range” parenting law in the country. Hurray, Utah! As many of you parents are aware, it has become increasingly more difficult to raise our children without interference. The new law redefines “child neglect,” allowing parents to use common sense.
The new law redefines neglect so that you now can now permit a child, (without fear of child protective services coming after you) whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity, to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, or to engage in independent activities, including:
Traveling to and from school, including by walking, running, or bicycling
Traveling to and from nearby commercial or recreational facilities
Engaging in outdoor play
Remaining in a vehicle unattended, except under appropriately defined circumstances
Remaining at home unattended; or engaging in a similar independent activity
Teaching children to be independent and responsible is a cornerstone to helping them develop into capable adults. More and more children are being “raised” under a protective umbrella and are not being given the opportunity to learn independence and responsibility and to think for themselves.
All of you parents living outside of Utah, beware you may get arrested and prosecuted for using your common sense and your understanding of your child when making decisions regarding their independence and safety.
Our staff at NACD has been busy creating lists of toys and gifts that we can recommend for parents. We have been asked time and time again to help parents find toys and gifts that will be fun, useful and that will hopefully help advance their children’s curiosity, development and education. As we have gone through this process of researching toys and gifts, we have all thought back to the gifts we bought for our own children at various stages of their development and gifts we received as children as well.
As parents, we are often in a quandary as to what to buy. Sometimes there is something our children are begging for that we may reluctantly purchase, but more often than not we wander through the stores, catalogs and websites looking for inspiration. Sadly, within days or weeks of having purchased gifts for a birthday or holiday, we find these gifts neglected and start deciding what closet to relegate them to.
Pondering the parental dilemma of what to buy for the child, I decided to look at the word “toy” and to see if we were perhaps starting off with a quest grounded in a misconceived perception. Going to the trusted Merriam-Webster Dictionary, I looked up the definition of a toy and discovered perhaps part of the problem. The significant pieces of the definition included: “something for a child to play with, something that can be toyed with, something (such as a preoccupation) that is paltry or trifling”. If this is in fact our underlying perception of a toy—a paltry, trifling thing to be toyed with—it’s no wonder most of what we buy for our children could fit under a general heading of “garbage” and often sadly, expensive garbage.
I believe what we want to do as parents is find things that are fun and entertaining, but also things that actually do something for the child. Learning can and should be fun, exploring can and should be fun, creating can and should be fun, building, designing, imagining and thinking can all be fun. These things do not sound like “toys”. What perhaps differentiates a “toy” from what we really want is a new educated perspective. What can I give my child as a gift that will be fun, but significant?
When I was a little boy, my parents, my little sister and I would often go visit my maternal grandparents. My grandfather was the custodian of his church and my grandparents lived very modestly. Throughout my childhood, there were only two toys at their house for us to play with. One was a set of Lincoln Logs and the other a United States Puzzle Map. Lincoln logs for the uninitiated are wooden dowels of different lengths notched at the ends so that they can be stacked like the logs in a log house and other various pieces that could be used for roofs, windows and such. The puzzle map had each state as a puzzle piece and on the piece, you could find the capitol and some symbols that indicated anything from what they grew or did in the state to historic landmarks. I wouldn’t want to guess how many hours I spend with these two “toys’. But, I can tell you that I built many different structures with the Lincoln Logs and enjoyed being creative and seeing how many different things I could design. I believe that because of my Lincoln Log experience I spend time as a teen designing houses and actually went to college with the plan of becoming an architect and designing energy-efficient, economical semi-subterranean houses. I was perhaps a little ahead of my time in 1965. A summer job working with special needs children changed that direction, but I have designed and build three houses, one of which is my present home. That inexpensive “toy” actually helped in making me who I am today.
I suspect that I could identify where every state was by the time I was four or five and could have drawn a map of the United States from memory by the time I was six—I can still do it. I never had an inclination to be a map maker, but I did develop a strong interest and knowledge of geography, which became a subject in school at which I excelled (there weren’t many) and has led to my traveling to all 50 states and seeing a lot of the world and being much more intellectually and socially conscious and aware than I would have otherwise been. I still remember as a child being amazed that so many of my friends had virtually no interest or curiosity about the rest of the country, let alone the world. I suspect their grandmothers didn’t have puzzle maps at their houses.
The right things at the right times can have very big and significant impact.
Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, take some time and give some serious thought before purchasing a gift. See it as an opportunity to help shape a life—that certainly is not a paltry or trifling thing.
To view the list of gifts our NACD staff has put together, visit:
Twelve-month-old Arielle is challenging other children to raise the bar and get to work.
Today’s children are doing fewer chores than ever before, and as a result we should not be shocked to realize that many teens and young adults have missed some very important lessons.
Responsibility
Having specific jobs that the child owns is a fundamental building block to learning how to be responsible.
Service
Learning to do things that don’t appear to directly help you is vitally important. Those children who learn to contribute and help others or the family are generally not going to be those who grow up feeling entitled. Doing things for the family helps connect the child to the family and helps provide some needed perspective. Self-centered children can lead to self-absorbed teens and adults.
Independence
The more children learn how to take care of themselves, their homes, and their families, the more independent they feel and become. Children who learn independence develop confidence and initiate doing more and more themselves, while those who are dependent fear and often fail to move themselves forward.
Highly Capable
Learning how to take care of your living space, your room, and your home not only teaches independence, but also teaches an appreciation for clean, organized, and pleasant surroundings. Learning how to do your laundry, prepare your own nutritious food, take care of the yard, and even learning how to fix and repair things around the house all lead to confident, highly capable adults. These apparently simple skills help develop the perception and the capability that permits you to take on challenges, confront problems, and address them.
Work Ethic
Many teens and adults sadly never develop a strong work ethic. A good work ethic is exemplified by the basics, including reliability, dedication, productivity, cooperation, and strength of character.
I hear many parents today say that their children do not have time for chores, their day is full of schoolwork, sports, music, dance lessons, etc. If your children don’t have time for chores and all of the vital lessons that come with it, I suggest you reevaluate what they are gaining from the sports and the “lessons” and think about the real basic lessons they are missing
A few years back I had the opportunity to participate in a meeting with five couples. These five couples were part of an organization of young presidents of companies. They invited me to the meeting because they were having a discussion about how they were “screwing up their children.” The couples had children ranging in age from about 10 into their 20s. As I began the discussion, we started talking about the lives of these company presidents. We all quickly learned that four of the five men had grown up in pretty typical middle class families and had chores from early ages and had jobs through high school and college. In addition, the four went to state colleges and excelled in life because of hard work, a good understanding of who they were, and a strong work ethic. All of the couples realized that their present standard of living had not helped, but had hindered their children’s development. The families were able to afford to hire help to clean their houses, take care of the lawn, and even help with food preparation. The couples had mistakenly thought that freeing their children from chores and giving them more time for sports and various lessons was providing them with an advantage. What was learned through the discussion was that the families were universally disappointed in their children’s basic characters, sense of responsibility, and their lack of a strong work ethic. They had been at a loss to understand how their children, having been given “every advantage,” were not developing into the adults they had hoped and worked for.
The meeting with these couples was very enlightening. You don’t need to be the president of a company and wealthy to make the same mistakes as these couples. As I was leaving the meeting that night, I made a discovery. Four of the five men were presidents of companies and one was not. In fact, despite having graduated from Harvard, the fifth was unemployed. His wife was the president of a company.
Building the foundation
Here are a few helpful guidelines to help you get your children heading down the road to more chores and a better character.
Little children like 12-month-old Arielle can be helpers; and the sooner they learn, the better. For young children helping is fun, as is learning. Little children almost universally love learning most anything if it is done in a positive manner. Look for opportunities to let them help. View each of these circumstances as an opportunity for your child.
Helping is great, but it is only the very first step; and by two or three years of age, you want to have taught your child how to do tasks all by themselves. There are many things these little people can do if you teach them how and if you provide the right tools and use the right methods.
Reverse chaining: Reverse chaining is a great way to teach new skills. A close cousin to chores is self-help skills. Self-help skills include all of those things that permit you to take care of your basic needs, including things like dressing, undressing, toileting, bathing, self-feeding, brushing teeth, etc. As important as these self-help skills are, they should not be confused with chores, but in many way these first steps help start the foundation of independence and self-reliance. Reverse chaining is a great way to teach many multiple step tasks. Typically, if you are trying to teach a multiple step task, you start by teaching the first step and progress from there. There are a number of disadvantages to this approach. With first step forward instruction, the child just starts a task; they don’t finish it. Often after they have completed their piece, they tune out the rest of the steps. With first step forward instruction, the child tends to become prompt-dependent, meaning that they do a step and wait for a verbal or physical prompt to do the next step. And finally, the reward of doing a task is in the completion of the task, not doing the first steps of a task. First step forward teaching lacks the foundation of motivation that moves progress forward.With reverse chaining you start by completing a task up to the very last piece, and then you teach the child how to do just this last piece that completes the task. Then you complete all of the steps up to the next to last and teach that; and then the child is able to do the last two steps and again complete the task. As a simple example, let’s look at teaching a child to take off a sock. With the first step forward approach, you would start by teaching the child how to put their fingers between the sock and their leg, followed by step two, which is trying to them pull the sock down. The child would then typically mentally disengage while you completed the task. With reverse changing you would start by pulling the sock down so it is hanging off their toe, and their job is simply to pull it off their toe—it’s easy and the task is complete. Step two is to go through all of the steps until the sock is half-way or more down their foot. The child can easily accomplish this step and complete the task. Completing the task is much more rewarding than starting the task. It also teaches the child that they can, in fact, take their sock off. Proceed with pulling the sock down so it is just off the heel, then just over the heel, then a bit above the heel, and then up the leg. Reverse chaining can be used with virtually any task that requires learning a number of steps.
If you are sharing a job, you are still just helping. The goal is for the child to own the chore. A common mistake in homes where parents are consciously trying to teach their children to be responsible for chores is to share or rotate chores. Parents generally do this in an attempt to be fair and avoid arguments between children as to who has the toughest job. Probably the most common situation involves mealtime. The sharing of the task goes from one child washing, the other dries, one sets the table, another clears the table, one does the dishes this week, the other next week. The problem with this approach is that no one owns the job. The more you can delineate responsibilities and provide ownership, the better. Owning a job means that you are responsible for that job. If you own it then you can take satisfaction in that job being done well, consistently, and in a timely fashion.
Do not underestimate what you children can do. Most children, by the time they have reached the developmental level of a ten-year-old, can do most any cleaning or organizing task within the home, as well as most cooking and outside tasks, with the possible exception of using some power tools. If the mother of two or more children over ten is still doing a lot of the housework and cooking, they are probably depriving their children of important opportunities.
The proper tools can make a big difference. Most fairly young children could vacuum a house or mop or clean a floor if they had the proper tools. Your six-year-old might not be able to lug around a big vacuum cleaner, but they probably could use a lightweight battery operated vacuum. Brooms and dustpans aren’t really terribly efficient for anyone, let alone a child; but there are little electric dust busters, Swiffers, etc. that work reasonably well. One way to compensate for a child’s inability to do an expert job that satisfies mom’s critical eye is to compensate with time and frequency. You might vacuum your house once or twice a week; a child could do it many times a week. You can also have them learn to use a timer so that they are spending sufficient time to get the task accomplished well. And remember to use reverse chaining to help teach them how to do the job properly in the first place.
One of the most common errors in getting children to do chores is setting them up to fail. The more ambiguous the time requirement for the completion of a chore, the more likely it will not be accomplished without intervention. The best/easiest chores are daily chores that occur at a very specific time. If a chore is a weekly chore, it needs to be attached to a very specific time or as part of a chain of events. Scheduling chores around specific time-related events should help tremendously. Look at the child’s day and identify the events that occur at fairly exact times, such as meals, going to school, or soccer practice. Use these events as the foundation for scheduling chores. Think about a list of chores before or immediately after breakfast or dinner as places to start. Speaking of places to start, one of the very basic things that teaches responsibility, self-reliance, and maturity is getting oneself up in the morning. Try to have a specific time your child needs to get up, and once that time is established, your child should have an alarm clock that starts their day. If your child doesn’t get up when the alarm goes off, be creative and come up with some responses that will teach them to do it—quickly.
There is a question as to whether to directly reward/pay children for doing their chores. Some families choose to use a token economy system in which the child receives a token, check, or star for every chore that is completed, and then the tokens are exchanged for money or special privileges. Many families find that this approach works. I honestly do not prefer the token system because it basically implies that the child is doing something extra or special that should be rewarded beyond just a verbal acknowledgment. I would generally prefer to see the child receive a set allowance that is essentially an acknowledgment that they are a contributing member of the family, and then some form of natural consequence for not completing their chores. It may be necessary to start with a reward system to get things started, but if you do, try to phase out the system as soon as possible. I do think that providing a list of things that children can do above and beyond their chores, such as washing and waxing dad’s car, is appropriate, along with a specific dollar amount to be earned.
One of the realities of developing, orchestrating, and teaching your child how to do chores properly involves looking for and providing the opportunities and scheduling. We could lump these pieces under the general term of management. Management is a reality of running a home or raising children. A vital role of management is oversight. I have spent the majority of my adult life traveling around the country and the world meeting with families. All of this travel involves more hotels and restaurants than I would care to recall. Staying in all of these hotels and eating at all of these restaurants makes the role of management incredibly relevant and obvious. When you observe people at the hotel desk who don’t know what they are doing or who get your reservations confused, or poorly prepared food that is late and cold at a restaurant, it is an issue with training, oversight, and management. Do not expect your children to function in their jobs without oversight and management; it isn’t going to happen. If most adults can’t function without it, don’t expect your children to. Ultimately, with proper oversight and management, your children will learn how to be responsible, how to pay attention to detail, and how to complete tasks well without supervision. But until they have been taught, don’t expect a miracle.
If you have a child who is mentally and physically capable of doing chores and you cannot find time in their day for these tasks, you should re-evaluate priorities. The lessons learned from doing chores, such as becoming responsible, learning to serve, being unselfish, independent, highly capably, and developing all of the aspects of a good work ethic, are vital to building a personal foundation for your child that will serve them well throughout their lives. The role of chores in the development of typical children is vital, however all of the benefits of chores are magnified for those with special needs. One of the greatest issues for those with developmental issues is dependency. The greater the issues the more dependent the individual. It is important to try to find appropriate chores commensurate with the abilities of the individual and taking the time to find the proper tools and offer the proper training is so that they can contribute and learn all of the associated lessons.
Many parents neglect to realize that one of our jobs as parents is to raise our children to be functional adults, responsible, competent members of society, and perhaps parents themselves, who will need all the tools they can get to help the next generation succeed. There are far too many big children out there who believe they are adults.
Potential is a refection of opportunity. Let’s provide our children with all of the opportunities we can to build their personal foundations.
—Bob Doman
P.S. In the spirit of full disclosure, Arielle, the Big Helper, is my granddaughter, daughter of my son, Laird, and his lovely wife, Sadie. I have issued the challenge in her name. The videos were shot the week of her first birthday. She is a beautiful and, of course, smart little girl whose proud grandfather is going to have to exercise a great deal of self-restraint not to spoil.
This picture is from the recent wedding of Natalie Hagan, a great gal who has helped implement NACD programs with these two terrific kids—Abby and Lucas. Between these two proactive families, their schools, and caring individuals like Natalie and Debbie Hayden, the OT that referred them and has helped them implement their programs, we have a great model of what can be, what should be, and what needs to be.
Potential needs to be defined by opportunity and not by diagnosis or label. Outcomes for children with the same or similar labels can be dramatically different, with those outcomes largely being predicated on the opportunities provided.
Abby and Lucas both have wonderful families—families who have been great at getting their NACD programs implemented, advocating for their children, and looking toward their children’s futures. In both cases, the kids’ schools have learned to cooperate with and support the parents in the implementation of their NACD programs and their goals, and in addition have provided appropriate class placement and support. Both families have also successfully found help at home to assist in completing the children’s individualized NACD programs with excellent results.
I spoke of Lucas in a previous post, so now let’s talk about Abby.
Abby was referred to NACD by her occupational therapist when she was just over a year old. Abby is now an eight-year-old who will be entering the 3rd grade in a typical classroom and who is doing well academically and socially. She is involved in Girl Scouts, ballet, and she plays softball. Abby is a star, loved by classmates and everyone who is fortunate enough to know her. She is an entrepreneur. She also has Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome).
Being proactive and planning for her future, her parents have already started a business for her called, “Abby’s Mini Golden Doodles” with her own facebook page:
Abby is actively helping with the first litter of puppies and is learning how to care for the dogs. The plan is for her to learn dog training and handling, with the goal of developing a business involving dog breeding and dog handling, as well as a companion and therapy dog program.
One of the very difficult realities that most adults with Down syndrome and many adults with other developmental issues have is that the world is often only welcoming up to a certain point. Through the years, we have seen young adults with good academic function, good social skills, and even college degrees that could not get a job even close to commensurate with their abilities and skills. Imagine a child with Down syndrome working hard, with a ton of support from their family, academically competing with their peers, getting the same high school diploma as their classmates, having in many cases more appropriate social skills than most of their peers, and then being encouraged to pack groceries or move grocery carts upon graduation by their vocational advisors. This is obviously something that must change, but until it does, families having or starting businesses for their children is a very viable alternative for proactive families.
Abby is a delightful, happy, wonderful, contributing and beautiful child with a bright future. When everyone works together–parents, caregivers, therapists, school administrators, teachers, community members and organizations–to help the family achieve their goals for their child, there should be no limits.
What can be, what should be and what needs to be.
Potential is defined by opportunity.
P.S. – Often at the conclusion of Abby’s visits with me, she stops at the door, turns around, gives me a huge Abby smile, waves, and says, “Bye, Bobby.” Gotta love this kid!
I needed to write this story about my nine-year-old hero, Lucas Fritsche. Lucas exemplifies what can be, what should be, and what needs to be. Lucas’s story is one of a committed and proactive family, therapists who knew this child needed more than what they could provide, a school that learned to work with and assist a family, and a community that was willing to help and to listen.
I first met Lucas and his family in 2014. Lucas came with a bit of a “rep.” In preschool he was notorious for biting someone daily. When he started with NACD, he was in first grade and had been globally regressing since the previous summer. At the age of six, he had already been diagnosed with PDD/NOS, epilepsy, complex partial seizures (for which he was being medicated), sensory dysfunction, low muscle tone, and digestive and sleep issues. His school had him classified as autistic. He also had severe behavior, social, and academic issues.
From a neurodevelopmental perspective, Lucas had some sensory issues, as well as issues with muscle tone, strength, coordination, developmental motor skills, physiology, and auditory and visual processing. In addition to all of that, he had a questionable seizure disorder. The bottom line was we had a six-and-a-half-year-old child who was neurodevelopmentally where I would have liked to have seen him at age three, going on four. He had lots of potential—nothing scary, just pieces to put together.
Lucas had been referred to us by friends who have a child with Down syndrome named Abby, who was then and still is on an NACD program. I will a write separate post about Abby and her super occupational therapist, Debbie Hayden, shortly.
Lucas’s terrific parents were obviously anxious to see their son do better—much better—and were doing all they knew how to do with the help of doctors, therapists, and the school. They needed more and needed to address the causes, not the symptoms. Under ideal situations, I would have pulled Lucas out of school, kept him home, and had the majority of the day to address his issues one on one. Lucas’s dad was a farmer, a job requiring more than full time attention; his mom worked full time in HR; and they also had Lucas’s three-year-old sister, who needed their attention as well. So, Lucas needed to be at school full-time, and we needed to elicit the help of the school, as well as find some people to help his parents with program after school.
After that initial evaluation, I discussed his issues with his parents, and we started on a plan to address his problems, including his behavioral issues. The reality of Lucas’s behavior was that we had a strong willed, rather intense, six-and-a-half-year-old in first grade who had the ability to understand, think, and communicate like a three- going on four-year-old and a neurodevelopmental problem—we had to address his particular pieces.
It would have been nice to wave a magic wand, if it were possible, and have advanced him three years in a blink. Unfortunately, it takes some time to normalize sensory dysfunction, address physiological issues, sleep, severe processing delay, catch up academically and create new patterns of behavior.
Second grade had its challenges. He entered a new school year, and on day four he bolted from a situation. When his teacher grabbed him, he punched her. Unfortunately, because of a recent surgery, she needed to go to the hospital. Lucas was suspended for three days. Not a great start. After he was allowed back to school, he got upset at lunch with another student and hit him. Following this incident, we set up a behavior strategy to coordinate things between his parents and the school, which ended the aggression. That year he spent 85% of his school day in a resource room with an aide who did his NACD program with him. The other 15% of his day, he was with his peers.
It was then decided that it would be in Lucas’s best interest to repeat second grade while we continued the catch-up path. This second time around, with coordination between parents, the school, and NACD, Lucas spent his day in the regular class with a part-time aide, with some pullout time for school-based therapies. Through that year, the time with the aide continued to diminish, and with his advancing processing skills and the opportunity to be with peers, his social interaction and social skills developed. A year following his suspension, Lucas received the school’s “Pirate to Be Proud Of” award, an award given to just one child per grade in the school each quarter. Academically, he went from failing to As and Bs. By January of that year all outside therapies were discontinued—they were no longer needed.
Third grade started well; however, a significant event occurred in September. During recess Lucas felt he was falsely blamed for an issue that had occurred. When the class returned to their classroom, there was no Lucas. Lucas, having in his first years of school been sent to the principal’s office on numerous occasions for inappropriate behavior, had not gone back to class, but had instead gone to the principal’s office. He didn’t go because he had done something wrong, but because he needed to report the misunderstanding of the situation, and he felt that because he was blamed, he needed to report there. Having gained audience with the principal, Lucas stated his case and then proceeded to inform the principal that the playground was too small, that his friend who was in a wheelchair could not access the playground, and announced that he wished to speak to the school board about the issue. At that point, I knew I was working with a really special young man.
In February Lucas finally got to address 50-60 community members, parents, teachers, and administrators and presented a plan to make the playground handicap accessible. (See the video below.)
Lucas’s mom is currently working with a local group to create an inclusive playground in the community; and Lucas, because of his initiative with the school, has been invited to participate and has become a key spokesman in the development of this 1.5-million-dollar project.
Lucas is now an A/B student and is doing great socially. This past June, he won a purple ribbon for his 4H woodworking project, which moves him to the state competition; and this September, he will be showing a steer at the local community fair.
Lucas has shed all his previous labels; his seizures are history as well as his medications, his therapists, and his aides; and he has gained a new image: bright, kind, compassionate, witty, smart, and my hero.
Lucas represents what can be, what should be, and what needs be. We need to look at children as individuals with unlimited potential and not as labels. He exemplifies how we can get everyone working together to help achieve the parents’ vision for their child and produce the desired results.
What can be, what should be, and what needs to be.
Potential is defined by opportunity.
P.S. – Lucas read an email I had sent to his parents where I told them that their boy was going to do great things. Lucas’s response was, “If Mr. Bob says I will do great things, then I will.” I’d put money on it.