There are no hard and fast rules about how much of the program you should use. As a general rule, a few skills taught thoroughly and carefully will help your child as much as, if not more than, many skills taught in a hurry by over-pressured parents. Skills put to one side now can always be taught later on. The following points may help you decide how much you are able to take on.

1. If your child is in the very early stages of learning: If your child is still a baby, you need to set very little additional time aside. Most of the exercises can be done as part of your daily routine of play with your child.
2. If your child is older and more active you will still find that many of the objectives can be taught during play or during normal household activities. Focused teaching sessions are best kept short for your child’s sake, as well as your own. Most preschoolers tire if teaching sessions extend beyond 15 minutes. An ideal to aim for might include:

• 15 minutes for Fine Motor and Receptive – Language exercises
• Two 10-minute sessions for Gross Motor exercises (less once your child is walking)
• 15 minutes for a play session where you concentrate exclusively on your Expressive Language objectives (though these can be taught during everyday activities).

This adds up to a maximum of 50 minutes a day. Still, 50 minutes can be hard to find in a busy schedule and you can help your child to progress with less, especially if you find ways to involve your child’s objectives in your everyday activities.

3. Fit objectives to the time available. The number of objectives you can teach in the time you have available will depend on the objectives you choose, your child and your ‘style’ as a teacher. It may take some trial and error to work this out. As a very rough guide, you might expect to cover four or five activities from the Fine Motor and Receptive Language checklists in a 15-minute session, two or three Gross Motor objectives in a ten-minute session, and perhaps three Expressive Language objectives in 15 minutes of play. The Personal/Social skills are a different issue, as they are taught solely in natural settings, at the appropriate time or day. Please treat these figures as no more than a starting point from which you will go on to discover the system that suits you.
4. Involve all the family. Other family members are often happy to take the responsibility for teaching one particular objective – especially when they are involved in the decision of what to teach.
5. Involve preschool staff and childminders. There may be particular objectives where people outside the home could help you. You are not asking for extra time to be spent with your child; rather, you are asking that time that would be spent in any case be used in a particular way. In years of involvement with preschool teachers, we have round them very willing and able to help, and to work in with the goals and objectives of individual families.
6. Arrange your objectives in order of priority. The skills with the highest priority are those that come earliest within the sequences or those that your child needs most. The others can be left until later. The notes on each skill in Part Two may help you to decide priorities.
7. Select a balanced and interesting program. Teaching sessions should be varied, however brief they are. Consider this factor at the same time as you consider your priorities. Include at least one skill in your program that will extend your child in an area of strength. Chances are he will enjoy this activity and enjoyment will help your child to learn.
8. See how you go. All teachers must rely to some extent on trial and error. Make a plan and stick to it for two weeks. (Any less, and you will not give yourself or your child time to adjust.) You will then be able to consider whether changes are needed to what you are teaching, or where, or when.

Some changes to your daily routines will be inevitable if you are to follow the Small Steps program, but it should not cause any major disruptions to your family life. You must respect your own judgment about how much extra work you can take on without prejudicing the well being of your family or yourself. Certainly your disabled child will benefit from time spent on his objectives, but he would lose emotionally, and learn less effectively, if his program led to tension in those around him. If your circumstances allow you to work on only one or two objectives at time, your child will still gain from your efforts to help him.

Let’s assume, that you have identified possible objectives from your child’s assessment and have decided which ones you can teach now. There’s one more factor to consider before teaching can begin. For each objective, ask yourself: Does my child have a good chance of reaching this objective in the near future, or is an in-between step needed. The steps within each sequence of the program have been designed to allow the moderately disabled child to make steady progress. But your child may be more severely disabled, and most children have difficulty with one area or another however quickly they learn in their areas of strength. At some point, you are bound to come across a step that seems just too big for your child – too much for him to learn all at once. The answer is to set smaller, in-between steps that take your child little by little towards your main objective. You will find in the notes in Books 4, 5, 6 and that for some of the skills in the program we have suggested a series of in-between steps. But when these are not provided, you can develop a series of steps yourself, using a technique called task analysis. You will also find task analysis helpful when you want to teach your child a skill that is not included in the D.S.1. There are two main methods of task analysis. The first method suits tasks which are composed of a series of separate actions such as cleaning teeth, or milking a cow. Here is how to analyse a complicated task.

1. Perform the task yourself. Do this several times, noting each separate action that is required to complete the activity.
2. Write down each separate action needed to complete the task. Sometimes this is easier if you watch someone else doing the activity.
3. Arrange all the items in a suitable order for teaching. There are three main ways to order the items: the order in which they naturally occur, the reverse order, and from easiest to hardest. The reverse order is the order most commonly used, because it gives the child the satisfaction of completing the activity all by himself. If the task is taking off a singlet, and the first thing you teach him is the final pull, up and off, he will feel he has really achieved something right from the start. You can then go on to teach him to pull the singlet off his head and an arm, and so on. Each order has its advantages, so choose the one that feels right to you.
4. Set the first item to be taught as your first objective. As you teach your child to do this first step by himself, you will help him through the rest of the activity. Once he has achieved the first objective, introduce the second. The amount of the task with which you need to help him will decrease as he progresses through the steps you have planned.

The second method is suitable for the tasks which, while requiring few separate actions, are just too difficult for the child to manage. In this method, either the materials or the amount of work required is modified to make the task easier. Many of the sequences within the D.S.I. have been developed in this way. The child who is learning to thread beads, for example, learns first with large beads, then with medium beads and finally with small beads. The child who is learning to cut with scissors is required first only to snip, then to cut across a thin strip, then to cut across a square of paper, then to cut on a line and finally to cut out shapes. You can add extra in-between steps to suit your child and ensure steady progress. There is plenty of scope for creative thinking in setting up a teaching program to suit an individual child. No book can take account of the exact nature of your child’s needs and abilities. We urge you to add to and adapt the objectives listed in this program, and we hope that you will find this process interesting and enjoyable.

Praise

Praise is the most natural form of reinforcement and the most readily available. Everybody likes to receive it and (almost!) everybody is ready to give it. Happily, it is also very effective, in terms of encouraging the receiver to try for more. For many children their parents’ approval, shown through praise, is all they want and need. But praise, because it is so readily available to children, can become too familiar and thus lose its reinforcing power. Parents and teachers need to be creative about their praise. Here are some suggestions.

1. Vary your praise. If you say ‘good girl’ 20 times a day, it will not seem special to your child. Look at Box 3.2: Thirty Ways to Say ‘Very Good’. You will be able to add many more ways that are special to you and your child.
2. Let your child know what vou are praising her for. This is especially important for older children but it is a good habit to get into right from the beginning. Your child should not feel that your feelings for her, as a person, are affected by your approval (or disapproval) of her actions. She should always be sure that you like her, but she also needs to know that you like her drawing or the way she brushes her hair or the tower of blocks she has built. Be specific in your praise.
3. Emphasise your praise. Someone can say to you or me ‘You did that very well today’ in the same tone of voice that they would use to say ‘Your shoelace is undone’, and we would still glow with pride because we understand the concept that is being expressed. But your child may not understand. She will understand you through your tone of voice and the expression on your face. This does not mean that you should leap out of your chair and jump for joy every time your child puts a block on a block. You must, of course, be true to your own personality. But even the most reserved person can achieve a difference in tone between approval, neutral comment and disapproval. Some difference, however subtle, is essential if children are to learn what behaviour is acceptable and what is not.

A final word about praise. Always include praise in your response to your child, even if you are using some other method of reinforcement as well. If you are using another method, use it as a way to teach your child the value or praise.

Touch

Most young children love to be cuddled, kissed, patted and stroked. Teachers must question their right to use touching extensively with older children but parents need have no such foibles – physical contact between parents and children is a natural and mutually rewarding experience. So if you and your child like exchanging cuddles along with praise, go right ahead!

Special treats

We refer here to special treats other than food – time with special toys, hall’ an hour in the sand- pit, a ride on the tractor – whatever your child especially enjoys. Such treats can, of course, be given spontaneously to all children from time to time and they can help to strengthen the sense of approval that is gained through praise. If your child is not responding to praise and touch alone, special treats can be used systematically to help her to see that doing what you ask of her is worthwhile. For a very young child, put the special toy or other treat in view while you do your work. Tell her that it is there for her when she has finished. An older child could perhaps simply be told of the treat that is planned. Remember to use praise as well, and when your child is responding to your directions, use the treat more and more infrequently (see the section that follows: When to Reinforce). Like praise, treats may need to be varied. You might plan two or three that you can rotate.

Tokens

The problem with treats is that they are usually only available at the end of a session. Children may have difficulty keeping hold of the idea that the treat will come. They may expect it after just one try at a task, and be unwilling to keep on practicing. Tokens have the advantage that they can be given after every try. A token is a symbol that can be saved and later exchanged for a special treat. Money is a kind of token and token systems used in classrooms are sometimes called ‘token economies’. You could use counters or stamps on a chart or empty cotton reds; it really doesn’t matter, as long as your child understands their significance. To teach your child the value of tokens, you must initially make your treats very ‘cheap’. Let her ‘buy’ her treat when she has collected just a few tokens. Later, you will be able to ask her to collect more tokens (say, 10) before she buys her treat. Some form of chart is very useful here because it lets her know how far she has to go. Be sure to pair your tokens with praise, and encourage your child to find other sources of satisfaction. Your long-term aim will be to make the tokens less and less important, and finally, unnecessary. Tokens and treats have an important role to play and in many cases they have been successful where all else has failed. But your child must be able to understand what they are for before they will work and thus they are of little use with very young or severely disabled children.

Food

You may already have reservations about using food for reinforcement and you are wise to be cautious. Penelope Leach, in her book Baby and Child (Penguin, 1979), suggests that parents should ‘keep the emotional temperature down’ in their attitude to sweets and snack foods: A child should not get potato crisps because he has been good any more than you would offer him cabbage for this reason. His ice-cream should not be withheld because he has been tiresome any more than you would refuse to serve him meat. This is good advice. In addition, many disabled children have metabolic problems which make it necessary to watch their weight. In such cases the consumption of snacks should be carefully limited. Despite these reservations, there is a place for using food as a reward. If your child does not respond to your praise and does not understand or enjoy a treat or token system, the use of food is worth considering. Most children find food of some kind reinforcing and some will comply with their parent’s directions on no other terms. It is almost certain that your child needs to learn, more than she needs to be protected from food rewards. Here are some suggestions for using food as reinforcement.

1. Treat this as a means to an end. You are using food in order to teach your child new skills, and in order to teach her to respond to your praise and touch. Always give praise as well as food, and as soon as possible, start giving food less frequently (see notes that follow on When to Reinforce).
2. Use the most nutritious food that your child will accept. Don’t use lollies if your child enjoys little cubes of cheese or sultanas or sips of fruit juice.
3. Use the smallest portions your child will accept. If you are using lollies, choose soft ones that can be cut up into smaller pieces.
4. Try to limit your use of food reinforcement to certain times of day, or certain activities, for example, a I0-minute structured teaching session at a table. Be sure to plan each day at least one activity that you can enjoy together where there is no thought of food and where you are building on your child’s sense of you as a rewarding person.