The role of Housework in Therapy

This post is dedicated to my wife. By involving and training Adi in chores at home and outside,  she has  expanded Adi's capabilities and also initiated development of life skills. 

The journey has started and  it is a blessing to see Adi  as a responsible member of the household by unloading the dishwasher, making his bed, folding his clothes and organizing his space. One of the traits of an autistic child that can be beneficially leveraged is the unfailing repetition of a task which can be made enjoyable for the child. He or she will continue to repeat it "as taught" provided the task is something interesting. Similar with chores. 

The challenge lies in making a chore interesting so that the child may follow it. For example, Adi like most autistic children loves sorting. Give him the entire set of washed knives, forks and spoons and he will sort the same happily into the cutlery tray. Expecting him to unload the dishes every time on his own and put them one on top of the other in the dish rack is an entirely different thing altogether. Imagine for a moment if the dish rack was made of a set of different sized slots - each for a particular design of dinner or snack plates - he would do it easily and often without being asked to do so.  Similarly, need some thinking on how to make the task of folding clothes and making the bed more interesting and order confirming to him. 

Similarly, grocery shopping would hit the mark. We will start this process shortly by giving Adi a list of items he knows by name and then guide him to the shelves to pick up each item. I am sure he will do this on his own and this shelf search and move from shelf to cart is something which confirms to a pattern that he likes. Plus the added advantage of him liking many of the food items like cookies, ice cream, frozen pizza and so on. These days he likes grocery shopping when allowed to pick up some foodstuffs that he likes and take them - his comfort snacks . We need to maintain a balance else the cart will fill with Hostess and Ben and Jerry's.

His world is indeed wondrous. It makes us think and makes us work to build scenarios for him. And praise God's greatest creation that drives us - the feeling of unconditional love.