Intellectual Disabilities (or PWID)

We are going to talk about adaptive behaviors; which comprises three skill types:

• Conceptual skills—language and literacy; money, time, and number concepts; and self-direction.
• Social skills—interpersonal skills, social responsibility, self-esteem, gullibility, naïveté, social problem solving, and the ability to follow rules/obey laws and to avoid being victimized.
• Practical skills—activities of daily living (personal care), occupational skills, healthcare, travel/transportation, schedules/routines, safety, use of money, use of the telephone.

In this blog we will not have time to talk about all three and certainly this is not the forum to answer and address all the problems. We would need days, months, years to do that, but we will address one section at a time.

Conceptual skills, we have talked a bit on this in the area of language, as a reminder we talked about making sure we speaking in concretisms and not abstractions. It is very difficult for the pwid to gather their thoughts other than in a concrete way. They need specific, black and white communication.  For example “How are you?” can be considered an abstraction. It is not really specific, but because it has been asked for so long it has been the routine and everyone knows that no one really wants to know, the answer has also become a standard “fine”. To put it more succinctly, the questions you asked need to be more topic focused. Have you washed the dishes, have you seen any good movies lately? Think about getting a yes or no answer to your questions.  

Money is a difficult one, we short cut everything. If they are capable to go out to a restaurant by themselves or with friends and have to figure out a tip the easy way that we have used is the fingers chart. Let say the bill in 25.00. They count on their hand using one finger at a time in 5.00 increments. So a bill for 25.00 would use 5 fingers and that would be a 5.00 tip. Pretty simple but that gives them confidence to figure it out by themselves. We also round everything up from .50 or down, if it is less than .50. If some is 3.23 we put down 3.00, the next item is 4.51 we round up. It pretty much balances itself out. Simple solutions that solve many problems, and they work for us.

Time can be a big turmoil, except when there is something important for her. That is where programs like Pathways we have here is so important. The events she chooses have a beginning and end time, and they expect people to be on time and have little tolerance for people who are late. They ask why and expect a reasonable answer, if they don’t show for the event there are consequences to be paid for that. Time management is not easy but do-able, with a little help from your friends.

I am running out of space so I will end it here. We will continue with this subject, to be sure. Thank you for reading this, I appreciate your loyalty.