Checklists to help ADHD and Autism Children and Teenagers

A child that has been diagnosed with ADHD find themselves lacking the ability to pay attention to details required to complete activities of daily living. Often the simple routine tasks are not completed independently without verbal prompts as the attention span of the child is limited which leads to frustration for the child, the parent and teachers. A child can build these crucial skills through consistency and encouragement.
Each task from each timeframe of the child’s day needs to be broken down into multiple steps in order to keep the child on track for the entire day. The checklists can include picture, words or a combination of both.

Morning Routine could include the following: Use toilet, wash face, brush teeth, comb hair, clean up sink, change out of pajamas, put pajamas into the dirty clothes, dress into clean clothes.

A checklist for chores would break down specific tasks, for an example sweeping the kitchen floor. Get the broom and dust pan from the closet. Pick up the rugs and shake them off. Place them outside the kitchen entry. Start sweeping by the pantry and end up at the kitchen entry, use the dustpan to sweep up the dirt. Place in the garbage can. Put the rugs back in the kitchen. Put the broom and dustpan back in the closet.

Checklists can also be used to track behaviors rather than tasks to complete. There are a minimum of 34 skills that a child with ADHD can be lacking in and need to focus on building up. The skills can be place in order of importance and worked on in that order. For example, the skill “staying on task” would not need to be added to the checklist as that is what the checklists are focusing on in whole. The checklist could track dealing with boredom, frustration, waiting your turn, doing good quality of work, patience, listening to others, accepting consequences, completing homework, accepting “no” answers, accepting criticism are a just a few of the skills to be learned.

The purpose of the checklists is to make remind the child to complete a task all completely before moving on to something else. This checklist process is meant to be an encouraging opportunity to mark success your child is making. It is a great opportunity for you and your child to celebrate his progress.