Today gave me one of those parenting lessons that I think a lot of us experience as our autistic children get older. Ben had a follow-up neurology appointment today. He is medically stable and doing well, but because his doctors are still evaluating some neurological concerns, he isn’t able to renew his learner’s permit or practice driving right now. He was disappointed. He had only been practicing in parking lots, and we were nowhere near independent driving yet, but even that small amount of practice meant something to him. It made him feel like he was moving toward another adult goal. What struck me today was how quickly the parenting lesson changed. For a while, I was thinking about how to teach Ben to drive safely. Now I’m thinking about how to teach him to get places safely if driving ends up not being part of his future. How do we teach someone to safely use Uber? How do we teach public transportation? How do we teach them who to trust, what to do if a ride doesn’t feel right, how to ask for help, and what backup plan to have if something goes wrong? As parents, I think we sometimes hold a picture in our minds of what independence will look like. And even when we know our child has never followed a typical path, it can still be hard when that picture changes. Driving makes me nervous for Ben for its own reasons. Things like response time, awareness of surroundings, reacting quickly, and understanding what other drivers are doing are all skills we have to think carefully about. But the alternatives can make me nervous too. The thought of him someday relying on drivers, transportation systems, or people outside of our family can bring up a completely different kind of fear. Today reminded me that I can’t stay in that fear. If the goal changes, then the teaching has to change with it. Maybe the next step isn’t teaching Ben how to drive. Maybe it’s teaching him how to request a ride, check the license plate, share his location, know where he is going, contact us if something changes, and practice these skills with support until they become familiar.

Life Skills: Learning to Cook Around Sensory Challenges 🥞 When Ben was younger, using the stove was a real challenge. One of the biggest barriers wasn’t the cooking itself — it was the sound . Ben was extremely sensitive to the sound of food sizzling in a pan. He called it “the sizzle,” and when he heard it, he would often run out of the room. So learning to cook on the stove has been something we’ve worked on very gradually over the years. We didn’t start with foods that required a very hot pan or created a loud sizzle. We started with quieter, more manageable cooking experiences and slowly built from there. Today, Ben can do things like flip a pancake, stir food cooking on the stove, and participate much more comfortably in meal preparation. He’s still not independent with stove cooking. He needs supervision, prompting, and help along the way — and that’s okay. The goal has never been to rush independence. It has been to help him participate, build confidence, and continue learning at a pace that works for him. Sometimes a life skill isn’t difficult because someone doesn’t understand how to do it. There may be a sensory piece making the skill much harder than it appears from the outside. For Ben, before we could work on cooking, we first had to work with the sizzle. ❤️ Are there any everyday life skills that have been harder for your child because of a sensory challenge? What helped them take that next little step?

Building Independence: Ordering for Himself 🍽️ There was a time when we had to prompt Ben through almost every step of ordering at a restaurant. “Tell her what you want to drink.” “What do you want to eat?” “Tell her what you want with it.” One little step at a time, we slowly faded those prompts. Now Ben can order his entire meal on his own — his drink, his food, his sides and any changes he wants. The part we sometimes still prompt him with is simply remembering to say please and thank you. Ben has some OCD around food, especially worrying that certain foods might touch or be mixed together. When he is ordering, he can become very focused on making sure everything is understood correctly. Because of that, he may sometimes sound very direct or factual. It isn’t his intention to be rude — he’s concentrating on making sure his order feels safe and predictable to him. So now, instead of prompting what to say, we might simply remind him: “Don’t forget to say thank you.” And to me, that shows how much has changed. Independence didn’t happen all at once. We prompted, practiced, stepped back, and then stepped back a little more. Sometimes progress is realizing that the help you’re giving today is much smaller than the help you once had to give. ❤️ What everyday skill are you working on building more independence with right now?

One thing I’ve learned about life skills with Ben is that we didn’t suddenly start teaching them when he became an adult. We practiced adulthood in very small pieces for years. It might have been having Ben order his own food. Handing the cashier his money. Answering a simple question from someone instead of me answering for him. Practicing what to say on the phone. Learning what information he needed to know about himself. Going into familiar places and slowly giving him more responsibility each time. For Ben, social skills and independent living skills usually worked better when we could practice them before he actually needed them. And we didn’t work on everything at once. We picked one little skill, practiced it again and again, and slowly backed away as he became more comfortable doing it himself. I’d love to start sharing more of the things we worked on with Ben as he got older—social skills, community skills, communication, safety, and everyday independence. If you have an older child, teen, or adult with autism, what is one life skill you’re currently working on?