Daily Living & Independence Glossary

Define independence with the person

Activities of daily living are foundational self-care activities such as eating, dressing, bathing, toileting, and mobility. Instrumental activities of daily living are more complex tasks such as shopping, cooking, transportation, money, medication, and household management.

Independent living skills support a person's chosen life with the level of help, technology, adaptation, and shared responsibility that fits. Self-care skills concern care of one's body, health, comfort, and daily needs.

Independence can include requesting help, using a checklist, choosing clothing, directing a support worker, or using accessible technology. A goal should never be selected only because it looks age typical to someone else.

Approach personal care with dignity

Hygiene includes body-care routines shaped by health, culture, sensory experience, privacy, and personal preference. Dressing skills can include choosing, putting on, adjusting, and removing clothing or directing assistance.

Toileting involves elimination, body signals, clothing, positioning, hygiene, communication, privacy, and environment. Screen for pain, constipation, urinary symptoms, medication effects, mobility, trauma, and other medical factors before treating difficulty as a teaching problem.

Explain each step, offer choices, obtain required consent and assent when applicable, protect privacy, and honor stop signals. Avoid public charts, shame, food restriction, fluid restriction, or delayed bathroom access.

The current BACB Ethics Code addresses client involvement, consent and assent when applicable, medical needs, risk, assessment, and evaluation for covered individuals.

Keep feeding and mealtime health-led

Feeding skills can involve safe eating or drinking, utensil use, positioning, pacing, food preparation, communication, and participation. Mealtime support includes environmental and partner actions that help a person eat, drink, communicate, and participate safely.

The ASHA pediatric feeding and swallowing portal addresses assessment, swallowing safety, nutrition, sensory and motor factors, and interdisciplinary care. Coughing, choking, breathing change, wet voice, weight or hydration concern, pain, or suspected aspiration needs qualified medical and feeding evaluation.

Food and water remain basic needs. Do not use hunger, thirst, forced exposure, or removal of communication to create compliance. A feeding goal should reflect safety, nutrition, autonomy, culture, access, and the person's experience.

Support sleep through the full context

A sleep routine is the pattern of activities, environment, timing, and supports around sleep. Sleep concerns can involve health, breathing, pain, medication, anxiety, sensory conditions, schedule, and family circumstances.

Begin with medical and environmental review when indicated. Measure the event the family wants to understand, such as settling time, night waking, sleep opportunity, or morning function. Avoid treating caregiver estimates as exact sleep physiology.

The CDC treatment page gives broad public-health orientation across intervention categories. It does not prescribe an ABA feeding, toileting, or sleep protocol.

Build community, leisure, and work participation

Community safety includes person-specific skills and system supports for transportation, traffic, navigation, identification, communication, emergencies, money, strangers, and chosen activities. Responsibility also belongs to adults, organizations, infrastructure, and accessible design.

Leisure skills support enjoyment, rest, creativity, social connection, and self-directed time. The person should be able to choose interests and decline structured activity.

Vocational skills support meaningful work or work exploration, including communication, task performance, self-advocacy, scheduling, transportation, safety, and requesting accommodation. Employment goals should reflect the person's interests and rights rather than training for compliance with any workplace demand.

Measure useful participation

Fictional seventeen-year-old Malik chooses a goal of preparing tea at home. Across eight opportunities with a visual recipe and adapted kettle, Malik completes six chosen steps without a prompt and asks for help during two steps. A caregiver responds within 30 seconds to both requests.

Report completed steps, help requests, partner response, safety, effort, and Malik's satisfaction separately. “75% independent” would hide the adaptation and treat effective help-seeking as failure.

The ASHA AAC portal says AAC users should always have access to their communication tools or devices. Keep communication available during personal care, meals, community activity, leisure, and work.

Ask whether the skill improves access to a chosen life, transfers to real settings, remains useful, and can be sustained without unreasonable family burden.

Design teaching around real access

Break a routine into steps only after checking whether the environment, tool, clothing, container, schedule, or communication partner creates an avoidable barrier. An adapted zipper pull, labeled drawer, safer kettle, visual recipe, automatic reminder, or quieter setting may solve more than repeated prompting.

Define which steps the person wants to learn, direct, share, or delegate. Teach help-seeking and repair alongside task performance. Prompts should have a clear purpose and fading or transfer plan, while useful accommodations remain available.

Practice across the people, materials, times, and places that matter. Report ordinary supports rather than calling performance independent after quietly removing them from the record. Review pain, fatigue, privacy, effort, and recovery as part of outcome quality.

Caregiver participation should be agreed, feasible, and supported. Measure partner preparation, wait time, response to communication, and environmental setup when those actions affect success. A low person score may reflect a missing tool or inaccessible instruction rather than a skill deficit.

Find ABA care near you and ask how a provider includes the person in daily-living goals, health review, adaptations, communication, and progress decisions.