Adults With Developmental Disabilities

 Our webstore, where we sell all of my disability resource books as well as some other fiction and non-fiction books we have written - "we" being my wife and myself - has a new design. You can check it out  at www.mosscanyon.com . 

Not only is the design new, but we now offer all of our books in digital as well as physical format. Yay! Digital means no shipping. Again, Yay!

This includes the Snap Curriculum, Basic Training for Direct Service Providers. How to Teach Daily Living Skills to Adults with Developmental Disabilities (epub file), Indoor Activities for Adults with Developmental Disabilities, Individual Service Plan Guidelines, Down Time Plan, The Task Analysis Book, and a Customizable Staff Orientation. All books are in a pdf format excluding the How to Teach Daily Living Skills book as noted.

This is a big deal and we hope you'll check it out.

And Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 Seriously? It's been a year since I wrote anything? My bad!

And what a year it's been. I would love to hear from some of you about how your program has been holding up under the pandemic. Group homes, how are you doing it? Day Programs, are you able to keep any staff working?

My SNAP Curriculum sales have slowed, but sets are still being ordered around the country. It's being used by agencies and schools in all fifty states now. I think people are looking for something to talk to their clients about.

Again, I would love to hear from some of you about how you're handling the added pressure.

 Merry Christmas and Happy New Year... at least I hope it'll be a happy new year. This year has been stressful for a lot of folks. I heartily applaud all of you people who support adults with developmental disabilities. This has been a heck of a year for you, I'll bet; with day programs closed down and clients stuck at home all the time...  and dealing with clients who don't understand masks or changes in routine... and for staff who were laid off during this time... and parents!

Yikes! I'm proud of all of you for handling it.

Don't anyone forget,too, this time of year can also be stressful on clients who are excited to see their families, but can't. Or clients who can't handle all of the extra sensory input from lights and decorations and whatever. Just keep reminding yourself, "This, too, shall pass."

It's a good thing we all love this line of work.

 

 

 I've had people ask me where I learned all the stuff I know about supporting adults with developmental disabilities since I often point out that I don't have a college degree and yet I now write books on that subject.

Well, eighteen years of hands-on experience taught me a lot, but where I learned to sort out what I had learned and be able to put it into coherent thoughts so I could pass on what I knew to others and to link together the concepts I had figured out to put them into practice in a manner that best benefited our clients was from a co-worker. When I was a program director, the smartest thing I ever did was hire someone who was a lot smarter than me. I take full credit for that.

Michael Floyd (who died of cancer a few years ago) had worked in the mental health field for 25 years when I hired him. This guy knew behaviors! He knew the book learning part and he had 25 years of putting techniques into practice. He was also good at explaining things like actually defining what a behavior is, operant and respondent behaviors, behavioral chains, informed consent, and so much more. 

You don't know exactly what those terms mean? You probably know about the concepts but just not the names. You may not know how to expand on what you know by truly understanding the terminology involved, too. All professions have their own particular jargon.

Does this mean that you need a college degree? Nope. In most cases, you just need someone like Michael to help you understand what you already know. That's why all of my resource books are written in easy to understand terms so anyone can grasp the concepts fully. I'm not saying that I ever knew as much as Michael did, but that's not the point. The point is that the more you know about what you know, the better you'll be at your job. How to put what you do know into practice is more important that knowing the fancy college terms.

Please let me encourage you to never stop learning!

 Before spending 18 years supporting adults with developmental disabilities, I was a fire fighter for 12 years. I worked for the US Forest Service, based on the Plumas National Forest (Northern California), and spent a year with the Citrus Heights Fire Department near Sacramento, CA. I worked hand crews, was a tanker (now they call them Engines) foreman and spent one season as a Hot Shot.

My brain says, "Go out there and help," but my 71 year old body says, "Are you nuts? Sit down before you fall down!"

So I sit and watch and mentally offer what moral support I can. 

Stay safe out there.

If anyone's interested, I do have a book about my experiences fighting fire in the 1960's and 70's. It's available on our web store www.mosscanyon.com.

All of my disability resource books are there, too.

Thanks for reading.

Yes, we're still here. Fortunately, ours is a home based business, so staying at home hasn't affected us. Day programs and schools closing has affected us, though. I would just like to let you know about some of our resource books that are also good for group homes or, frankly, anyone who is supporting adults with developmental disabilities in any setting.

Indoor Activities for Adults with Developmental Disabilities - How do you engage clients in interesting and fun age appropriate activities and still make those activities fall within your program's training mission? While there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing leisure activities for the fun of it, staff should always be on the lookout for "teachable moments" for skills training. This book includes twenty-eight adult age appropriate activities plus a few other ideas.

Down Time Plan - While the activities in this book were developed specifically for vocational programs that experience temporary interruptions to vocational skills training, there are some good ideas for discussions even at home. Keep your client's mind on vocational skills training even when actual work isn't available.

Task Analysis Book - While not an activity book, it is a good read for staff people who are tasked with discovering what parts of a skill individual clients need to work on. For example, you can't necessarily teach a person to "ride pubic transit." What part of riding transit can't the person do now? What all makes up "riding public transit"? This book breaks it  down into twenty-five individual skills that a person needs to master before riding public transit independently. There are a total of twenty-five skills broken down into distinct tasks in this book. Lots of ideas!

These, plus several other resource books are available from our web store at www.mosscanyon.com. The post office is still open and we are still shipping.

The biggest problem I see in the field of supporting adults with developmental disabilities is a lack of staff training. When I first started working, I was trained by current staff... who were really babysitters because they had only been trained by existing staff who were trained by...

No one had ever had any training in any form regarding supporting adults with developmental disabilities.

As I moved up in the organization, I was pleased that I was doing a good job continuing on with the fine work my predecessor had been doing... who had been trained by their existing predecessor... It took me a while to realize that none of us had any real idea what we were doing.

Two incidents took place that really brought this home to me. After I became the director of a day program within our agency, I got after a staff person who had spent an entire afternoon having the clients cut out paper chains. I pointed out that each client had a specific service plan detailing the specific skills that they were supposed to be working on. The staff person asked why they couldn't let the clients do whatever they wanted all day if that's what kept them happy. Other staff agreed with him. That's when I realized that my staff did not understand that we were a training program and not a babysitting service. Whose fault was that? We did no training, so it was my fault.

Another time, a staff person was talking to a care provider (which was against our rules  - only Support Staff could have direct contact with care providers) and as I approached them, I heard my staff person assuring the CP that no matter what we said, he would make sure this particular client would be taken care of. I spoke with the staff person as I went over his subsequent disciplinary action for breaking our rules, and he assured me that he knew best how to care for the client. Again, whose fault was that? We provided no actual training on what we were doing and how to do it. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks later I had to fire that staff person for additional actions, so he never got any training.

When I asked my supervisor about training, she (and later a he) both said that our training was fine. When I pointed out that we had no training, I was politely told to go back to work.

That's when I started writing my own training materials. My staff loved it! Other program directors were ho-hum about the concept of training and I had no support from administration, so I just proceeded ahead on my own. My staff learned how to deal with behavioral issues which made their lives and the lives of our clients much easier. Staff also learned how to learn how each client learns things and then how to teach the appropriate skills (read that sentence again).

I beg you - if you are in a supervisory position, PLEASE get some training for your staff. If you are a line staff, PLEASE beg your supervisor for training. We are not a babysitting service!

Where do you get training materials? Yeah, there's the rub. I sell my training program. You can see it at www.mosscanyon.com. Just click on the Disability Resource button when you scroll down the home page.

Our agency did eventually provide an online training program, although I don't know where it came from. I do know it wasn't very effective because staff took it at their leisure, and it was set up where you were supposed to read some material and then take a test... but you could skip reading and just take the test, and if you missed too many questions, you could just take the test again, remembering what answers you gave last time. There was also no way to ask any questions if you didn't understand something. PLEASE find a training series that you can give live. If it's not mine, fine. Look around and find something.