Teaching your Child How to Get Dressed
How to Get Dressed: Many parents and care providers enjoy dressing their children. It can be great fun for all!
However, there will come a time when you’ll need to start thinking about teaching your child how to get dressed.
Teaching your child how to get dressed – they’ll be receptive!
You can be sure that your child, at least to begin with, will be keen to participate.
From a very young age, they’ll start spontaneously taking items of their clothing off, with socks being often the first example. This comes about partly from their fascination with observing you when you dress and undress them and yourself but also at times simply from a natural desire to learn and exercise control over their body and what surrounds it.
After that, you may see them develop into trying to emulate you and put on items of their own clothing. They may show impatience when you’re doing it for them and try to interfere and do it themselves.
This is all fine and is a receptive platform you can build on when you start really teaching your child how to get dressed.
The first formal steps
Having said all of the above, it has to be acknowledged that this teaching can be frustrating at first! You can though help things along by preparing in advance:
- choose clothes that have easy fastening – expandable waisted trousers, skirts, PJs and underclothes;
- select items where possible that have clear colourful designs on the front – this helps children to identify ‘front’ and ‘back’;
- plan your priorities and avoid trying to teach all clothing at the same time. Starting with socks and moving onto trousers or skirts then eventually tops, is often successful. Starting with PJs is also a sound idea;
- teach your children the names of the clothes before you start trying to teach them to get dressed;
- it’s also useful to start teaching them to get undressed first. Dressing can take a little more skill and coordination and if they can already undress, they’ll have more confidence.
The method
Generally speaking, there’s nothing different here to how you’ll teach your children a range of other skills. Remember:
- allow them plenty of time and don’t try and rush them when dressing. This might mean leaving mornings where you’re on a tight deadline, like pre-schooling runs, until last;
- give plenty of encouragement and praise – even if the final result is a little chaotic;
- explain to them why you’re asking them to get dressed, such as “we’re going to the park afterwards”;
- never criticise or mock your child for a dressing outcome that has gone badly wrong.
Timetables
As always where children are concerned, standard benchmarks must be treated with a degree of caution because children will develop these skills at different ages. Even so, in terms of averages, between the ages of 2.5-3 years your child should be able to:
- take off & put on unfastened coats;
- remove their shoes once the laces are undone;
- pull on and off easy tee shirts with assistance;
- pull shoes on and off if they’re not laced – plus their socks. Expect wrong feet and back-to-front sock issues;
- tug up/down trousers and underpants.
Children suffering from a significant physical disability may have special needs in all these areas and they may not be capable of these milestones by this age range. Specialist aids are available for helping kids to learn how to get dressed.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
One possible symptom of ASD is that children may seem to have little or no interest in dressing themselves. They may even react badly if you try to encourage them to do so.
Once again, there are specialist regimes for children diagnosed with ASD that might help.
