Behavior Basics #4: Teach Routines

It sounds simple but it will take some work.  If your child isn’t an auditory based learner, verbal prompting will not be successful. How do I know?  Have you verbally prompted the steps to a routine to your child for a few months or more?  Has  he learned the routine well enough to do it independently?  If the answer is no, then he needs a more visual approach.

 My son was about 11 years old and I prompted him through every step of the morning routine before school.  If I allowed him to try it on his own, it never got done.  I thought he was unfocused and lazy.   That was not the case.  He was a visual learner. Once I made him a list where he had to check off each item as he did it, everything changed.  Within a few weeks he didn’t have to use the list and could remember the whole routine and move through it independently. 
 
He still needed some external motivation. I told my son that the quicker he did the list, the more time he would have for computer before he left for school.  Problem solved.  Well, it wasn’t quite that simple but it was far easier than the constant dependence on my verbal prompting.