Showering Independently

Sunday Scaffolding is a chance for me to show you how I broke down skills into parts and taught Michael to be independent.  Only you can decide (with input from your child’s therapists, teachers and doctors) whether your child is ready to learn this skill and whether this technique might work for you.

Like many skills, taking a shower is really just a chain of smaller tasks. In this case, the trickiest of these (and the most important for safety) comes at the very beginning:  the ability to get the water to a safe and comfortable temperature.  So, using a strategy called backwards chaining, we built Michael’s independence slowly, teaching this skill towards the end of the process.

Laminated List with Pictures

First, let’s talk visual aids: Michael has what the pros call a ‘task analysis’ visual. It is the list of steps needed to take a shower, or complete any task. It is laminated so he can just wet it and stick it to the wall. He still does this for every shower. I will never need to fade this prompt because showers are totally private and no one is likely to care how he gets the job done as long as he is clean.

Here’s how backward chaining works: you’ll help or guide your child through the first part of the process. You’ll show them how to do each step, start to finish.  Then, they will be responsible for the very last step in the process.  We taught drying off separately, so this last task was simply getting his towel off of the hook. Once they have mastered that, they will be responsible for the last two steps in the process, and so on until they are doing the whole thing by themselves.

Wow, how easy was that? Just kidding! It took Michael years to fully master showering on his own, but we felt much more comfortable teaching him this skill ourselves than outsourcing it to the professionals who work with him. If you need help, by all means, get it. Bathing is a very important life skill.

Tricky Parts

• Rinsing the soap from your body and the shampoo from your hair is sometimes challenging.  We minimized the trickiness by using pump soap and shampoo so the same amount is dispensed every time. That way, we could estimate a count of 10 to simplify it for Michael.  If you walk by the bathroom door when he is showering, you can sometimes still hear him say (rub, rub, rub 10, rub, rub rub, 9, rub, rub, rub 8…) while he is standing under the water to rinse out his shampoo.
• Finding the right temperature is very tricky. To make sure your child is safe, you can set your plumbing to have a maximum temperature. This prevents the water from getting above a certain temperature.  Once this is done, you still need to check and make sure it would not be possible for your child to burn themselves if you weren’t helping. Using backward chaining, this is one of the last tasks your child will learn. You will keep modeling it for them each time they take a shower so by the time they are trying it, they have seen it zillions of times.
• Stay present.  Even as they are learning to be independent, things can go wrong. Stay close by. Remember, Michael is now 18.  When we started this process, he was much younger and I stayed in the bathroom with him until he was very independent.  After that, I waited outside for a while so I could hear if he called me. Now, he takes his shower and I don’t need to be there, but that was a long road.

By providing the scaffolding (a visual aid and lots of training time), Michael was able to learn to shower on his own. You can’t imagine the pride he exudes when he is able to care for himself and do things independently. This is a big deal!