These are the last three subjects that I’ll be tackling on Trusera. Initially I just wanted to discuss fading, which is a huge hurdle for our family, but then I found that would be too difficult without touching on the other two first.

Sequencing is simple for most of us. Others find ‘doing things in the right order,’ a Herculean challenge.

Lets take an every day example, such as hand washing. I quickly discover that when I break the task down into it’s separate parts, there are 13 single steps to hand washing and they need to be done in the right order to achieve an approximation of cleanliness. If I take my chocolatey hands to the bathroom and dry them on the towel first, I will fail to achieve the desired result. Additionally, if I start all over again from scratch and eventually get to step 13 to dry my now clean hands, I find that the towel is all covered in chocolate. This is not a good result.

Hand washing is an every day life skill but it is an enormous challenge for some people. I decided to teach my boys how to do this properly on the minimum number of occasions. The minimum number of occasions turned out to be every time they used the toilet and prior to each snack or meal. As they both drank freely and frequently from the water taps, they also visited the bathroom every hour. Overall this teaching time would be repeated about 20 times a day with each of them. Usually, when you repeat a task with this amount of frequency, learning is reinforced, but it took a great deal longer than I initially anticipated.

I wanted to help my boys learn how to wash their hands independently. I drew up numbered pictures to guide them through and stuck them on the bathroom wall at eye line height. Although I was aiming at independence, in the meantime one on one guidance and prompting was the only option.

Initially, I had a large sack of M & M’s available, so that successful hand washing would be rewarded with one M & M. Instead of being a hated task, the reward might just make the experience worthwhile. They would associate success and reward for a job well done. Later I would gradually stop the M & M’s and make do with a high five and a hug. It was logical. It was ‘doable’ and eventually we would all achieve success. I was mentally prepared. The sooner we started, the sooner we would overcome the hurdle. I was ready to be consistent and persistent for as long as it took.

We made a start:-

I hereby declare that any day that my child doesn’t run away screaming at the very mention of the words ‘wash your hands,’ is by definition, a good day. Hence, I manage to arrest my child’s attention but inertia means that he is static and unwilling to walk. Feeble parents, anxious to commence the first step of hand washing suddenly realize that ‘walking to the sink’ was the real first step. An oversight I omitted. This parent cheats and carries the child to the sink.

Once at the sink, he suffers from a severe case of deflated balloon syndrome. His hands are in the sink but the rest of his body is floppy and draped against the wall for support. Weary sighs of boredom emanate from Mr. Why as he counts to twenty over and over again with the speed to challenge a seasoned auctioneer. His forehead rests on the rim of the sink as he chants. The clever parent is already aware that washing hands is boring, or a less preferred activity. The clever parent is already bankrupt, having spent far too much money on coloured soap, soap foam, dispensers and all manner of gimmicks to entice the child, as well as risky shares in chocolate manufacturing companies.

It has be a long learning stretch for us. I would add that it is definitely worthwhile checking how the school staff and therapists tackle the same task. Quite often, they also have a sequence of steps that they are teaching your child. It is unhelpful to be teaching several differing methods and a quick enquiry might help everyone use the same terminology. In my case it meant that I needed to insert an additional picture into my 13 steps, one that showed a child counting to 20 during the rinsing step of the sequence.

"Cheers dears"