Family and Caregiver Resources

Cooking is a great way to apply many different skills such as: practicing math (counting, multiply/divide to double or halve a recipe), turn-taking, or exploring different cuisines and cultures. 

If your child would benefit from visual cues and directions, Accessible Chef has a variety of recipes with visuals for ingredients and steps.

Even if your child is not able to go to the grocery store with you due to safety concerns, they may be able to help in various stages of grocery shopping by:

• Coming up with ideas for meals for the week (consider not only their own favorite foods, but what others in the family like to eat)

• Making a list of ingredients needed to make meals

• Checking the refrigerator/pantry for items to cross of the list

• Make final shopping list

• Estimate quantities of items needed based on the number of people in the home

Helping with laundry can help children and teens learn to be more self sufficient. Some children may be able to help with sorting light and dark clothes for different loads. Others may be able to help sort clean laundry for different family members, or help fold and put away laundry. If your child has never done laundry before, start with one step and build up once they are able to complete that step. For example: start with putting dirty laundry in the hamper, then work on sorting dirty laundry into lights and darks (Laundry booklet) 

If your child is having a hard time cleaning their room, here are some ideas to try:

• Provide a picture of what the clean room looks like as a model 

• Break cleaning room into different steps (written out or with a visual aid):

  • Put dirty clothes in hamper or laundry basket

  • Put toys in toy box

  • Put books on shelf

  • Bring dishes to kitchen sink or dishwasher

  • Throw away trash

  • Make bed

• A Visual Toileting Routine, Part 1 
• A Visual Toileting Routine, Part 2
• A Visual Toileting Routine, Part 3
• A Visual Toileting Routine, Part 4

• Quick Tips: Improving Sleep for Children with Autism
• Bedtime Schedule 
• Visual Bedtime Schedule 

• Understood for Learning & Attention Issues
• Homework Anxiety: What you need to know
• Child Mind Institute
• Video of Peg Dawson Ed.D, Coauthor of Smart But Scattered 

Teens with ASD: Puberty - What to Expect, Seizures, Anxiety, Sexuality

• Talking to your child about neurodiversity 
• What is neurodiversity: A video for children
• Embrace Autism- Superpowers and Kryptonites
• Getting Started: Introducing your child to His or Her Diagnosis of Autism or Asperger Syndrome 
• How do we explain Autism diagnosis & Special Class to our 7-year-old
• How to tell your child that they have Autism 
• Why everything you know about Autism is wrong | Jac den Houting