"Adulthood begins in preschool." What one transition session asks families to start now.

A free article for families, derived from Special Learning's course "Planning for Transition: Middle School to High School" (presented by Peter Gerhardt and Amanda Fishley, hosted by Karen Chung, with a panel of practicing behavior analysts).

Ask most parents when transition planning starts and they'll name a year in high school. Ask Peter Gerhardt and he gives you a catchphrase instead: adulthood begins in preschool.

He's spent his career with teenagers and adults with autism, and the session opens with what that career keeps showing him. He still meets young people of twenty-one who can't use a bathroom on their own or cross a street safely. His question, every time, is how nobody taught them.

The rest of the session is his answer. It was recorded for professionals, but almost everything in it is something a parent can use at home, starting with a child of any age.

The test for any skill: does it happen when nobody asks?

Every plan is full of skills a child has "got." The session asks one question of each of them. Does your child use it outside the room where it was taught, without being told?

A skill that only shows up for the teacher, on cue, isn't learned yet. One panelist changed the way her staff record progress for exactly this reason. If a student needs any further help after the first instruction, the answer for that task is no. Only doing it on their own counts as yes.

Gerhardt takes it one step further. He doesn't only want a young person to do the laundry when someone tells them to. He wants them to notice the laundry basket is full, and for that to be the reason they do it.

That's a high bar, and it's the right one to hold at home. The question isn't "can my child do this?" It's "would my child do this if I weren't in the house?"

Look five years ahead, then work backward

Gerhardt is blunt that teaching the wrong skill well is no better than teaching the right skill badly. So his first job is deciding what to teach.

At his school, the plan starts at twelve with one question to the family. Your child is twelve. What do you want them to be doing at seventeen? The team looks at five areas:

- a career - running a home - leisure - being part of a community - school

Then they work backward to what has to start now. He says it's easier, and it works better, than writing this year's goals from last year's goals, which is what usually happens.

He's clear that the five-year picture is a best guess. "Nobody has a crystal ball." The plan is a living document, reviewed every six months and changed whenever what you see says it should be.

You don't need a school to do this. You can ask the same question at the kitchen table: five years from now, what do we want our child doing on an ordinary Tuesday?

The chart that's worth printing

For a parent of a younger child, the most useful minutes of the session may be a chart Gerhardt walks through of what typical children do around the house at each age.

- Two to four: they help with almost everything a parent does, and they like helping. - Four to seven: they set their place at the table, put their own toys away, help make the bed, help load the dishwasher. - Eight to ten: they make their own bed, clear the table, dust and vacuum. - Eleven or twelve: they can do everything around the house, whether or not they actually do it.

Then he makes the point the chart is there for. If a family waits until twelve to start on these with a child with autism, that child is twelve years behind, and has twelve years of someone else always doing it to unlearn.

He names six skills he wants mastered by the age of ten:

1. using the bathroom alone, at home and at school
2. dressing alone
3. showering alone
4. eating with utensils
5. a way to communicate that actually works
6. taking part in ordinary family life: chores, shopping, holidays

None of these needs a therapist in the room. All of them need a parent who decides the practice happens.

Two questions to ask yourself tonight

Gerhardt asks parents two questions in his planning meetings.

Does your son or daughter get up to an alarm clock? Almost every parent says no. Almost every parent uses one. He calls the alarm clock a safety skill, because it means no one ever has to walk into an adult's bedroom to wake them.

If your child were left alone for twenty-four hours, what would they do? Would they make a sandwich? Take a shower? Take their medication? Get out of bed? Most parents tell him they don't want to think about it. "That's the problem," he says.

Neither question is meant to make you feel bad. Both show you exactly where to start.

Why we do it for them, and why it has to stop

The panel was honest about a habit families and professionals share. We do things for the child because it's faster, or kinder, or less of a fight.

One panelist told of a young adult whose parents said he could do his own laundry. He could. He also left it in the washer every time, and his mother moved it to the dryer. Another panelist, a parent herself, said that at the end of a long day she never made her typical son do what he could do, because she was tired.

Gerhardt's answer is that typical children pick up these skills along the way, and children with autism mostly don't. So the practice has to be built in on purpose, and the frustration that comes with it has to be allowed. One panelist added that building skills and being happy go together, not against each other.

Nobody else gets to say "he'll never"

On expectations, Gerhardt says something that's worth hearing if you've been told to lower yours. He'd rather work with a parent whose hopes are unrealistic than one whose hopes are low. He can shape the first down a little. He can rarely lift the second.

When someone tells him a young person won't be able to do something, his reply is short. "You don't get to say that. He gets to say that." Then they go and find out.

A panelist told of a boy she has known since he was five, whose parents never gave up on high standards. He speaks mostly in one-word phrases. He loves to cook, and at twenty-three he was working as a sous chef in a sushi restaurant. She says she would never have predicted it.

Employed, interdependent, and welcome

Three ideas near the end of the session change how a family might picture the goal.

Employed, not employable. Gerhardt says his students don't graduate employable. They graduate employed, because the adult world has far fewer resources to get someone there than school does.

Interdependent, not only independent. One father took his son to the same coffee shop every weekend for years. When he finally let him go in alone, the staff and customers quietly filled the gaps he'd been filling. That, Gerhardt says, is the real aim: people around a young person who support them in ways that look like independence.

Ask the community what matters. His team once asked customers at a grocery store what a young person with autism needed to learn to be included there. Rocking didn't bother them. Talking to himself didn't bother them. Being slow to pay held up the line. So the team changed what they taught: once your things are on the belt, get your money or card out without waiting to be told. The barrier came down. The lesson is to ask the people a skill is for, not to guess.

Things families rarely hear named

The session also raises a few things that almost never make it onto a plan:

- Happiness can be a goal, written down and measured like any other. - Leisure is only leisure if the person chooses it: what, when, where, with whom, and for how long. - Health care belongs on the plan. Gerhardt says many adults on the spectrum are still seen by their pediatrician, which is good for neither of them. - Your own life after school ends deserves a plan too.

If you are reading this outside the United States

The session was recorded in the United States, and the laws and services it describes are American ones. It says itself that in many countries there are no transition services at all, and that families there are the whole program.

What transfers isn't the law. It's the questions. Does the skill show up when no one is watching? What would your child do alone for a day? Where do you want them in five years? Who gets to decide what they can't do? None of those depends on any country's system, and you can start on every one of them this week.

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This article is drawn from a recorded Special Learning course. It is general information for families, not clinical advice, and not a treatment recommendation for any individual. It does not describe the rules of any particular school district or country.

Special Learning is a BACB Authorized Continuing Education (ACE) Provider (OP-14-2437). Authorization as an ACE Provider does not imply endorsement or approval of the ACE event content by the BACB.