Daily living skills are developmentally appropriate
practical skills necessary to care for oneself and meet daily
challenges, consisting of personal skills (ranging from
dressing oneself to avoiding sick people in order to remain
healthy), home or school skills (ranging from putting things
away with reminders to cleaning with cleaning products),
and community skills (ranging from knowing it is unsafe to
accept rides from strangers to telling the time) (Sparrow
et al. 1984). Daily living skills are both currently mastered
and performed regularly by children; yet, children with
ASD often do not perform skills even if they are capable of
doing so. A child’s mastery of daily living skills contributes
strongly to prognosis (Gillham et al. 2000) and have
been noted as ‘‘essential’’ to an individual’s ability to
function successfully and independently in the world (Liss
et al. 2001). However, many parents report difficulty
teaching daily living skills to children with ASD, finding it
easier to perform such tasks for their child (e.g., Koegel
and Egel 1979). It may be that due to low motivation and
limited perspective-taking (e.g., for social norms regarding
developmentally appropriate independent behaviors, such
as when peers are dressing or bathing without parental
assistance), children with ASD rarely defy their parents’
efforts to do these tasks for them.
Family-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a
probably efficacious intervention for the treatment of
anxiety disorders in typically developing children and
children with ASD (e.g., Wood et al. 2009; Wood et al.
2006) and may improve daily living skills in typically
developing populations as well (Flay et al. 2005). CBT is a
treatment paradigm in which new skills are developed by
motivating children and parents with logical and persuasive
rationales and Socratic questioning, challenging irrational
cognitions maintaining maladaptive and avoidant behaviors,
and practicing these skills hierarchically in real-life
(in vivo) situations. Given the importance of daily living
skills within the ASD population, developing efficacious
interventions to improve functioning is a high priority.
Accordingly, this study investigated the effects of the
Wood et al. (2009) family-based CBT program on parental
perceptions of daily living skills of children with ASD and
concurrent anxiety disorders.