Preparing Teens With Special Needs For Life as an Adult
When teens, or parents of teens, call us, they’ll usually talk to us about is struggles with schoolwork, such as staying organized, getting homework and projects done, or being able to problem-solve and generate ideas for what they need to do.
High School Students
Often we’ll hear that high school students having trouble with written expression, either the process of getting words from the brain to the paper or the actual mechanics of handwriting.
For our young adults, sometimes pre-vocational skills are the issue, like being able to complete a project in a certain number of steps, which is a skill we know they’ll need in the future. Sometimes It’s organizing a project on their own and coming up with strategies for that.
College Students
We hear these same things with our college students. If a problem is not taken care of in high school, it often carries over right into college. Sometimes if a student is marginal in high school, they get much worse in college. Often that’s where we see the anxiety level come up. And when the anxiety level goes up, their performance goes down—so we want to make sure our college students are provided with the tools they need.
Processing Information
Many of our clients struggle with processing, so we work with many different things to help their brain to be able to handle multi-task processes. When we do an activity we use multiple systems in our body to make that happen; and if those different systems aren’t communicating together, we’re not getting the ultimate output we want. We want all of our young men and women to be able to be at their top performance when they go out to do an activity. When they do go out into the community it’s a much more complex world, and we don’t have control over all the variables. This is where we’ll see breakdowns in things like being able to communicate what they need, and in making sure they’re organizing and communicating with multiple people on a project.
Job Interviews
There’s a lot of complexity that we don’t think about in life, in how we do our jobs. One of my favorite things is doing mock interviews. We do a lot of mock interviews because a lot of our young men and women are applying for college and looking for jobs. So we teach some of those skills, and we can give them feedback on the way other people perceive them in these interviews. We also teach keyboarding – because we live in such a keyboarding world.
That gives you an idea of just a few of the things we are doing with our teens and young ladies and men. If you have any questions, please give us a call! We’d love to talk with you!
