Teaching Life Skills, Including Friendship and Dating

Co-authored by Miranda Melcher

Life skills are needed as your neurodiverse client with learning disabilities (LDs) matures and gains independence. Often neglected, they greatly impact a student’s emotional well-being. They will likely need practical, hands-on training and significant help, especially when the skill involves a sensory issue. You can find a detailed exploration of such problems in our prior post on identifying and treating sensory issues. Highly personal, you will find the solutions through experimentation with your client. They are usually low-cost and easy to arrange by altering the environment or finding protective and/or adaptive mechanisms.

You'll want to support their age-appropriate desires regarding friendships, dating, gender, and sexual identity. What and when to treat will vary depending on your client with LD's developmental level, strengths, and most pressing challenges. As emphasized in the post “Learning From Your Client,” begin with what they tell you is bothering them the most. We list potential priority areas below.

Necessary Life Skills

• Cooking: Learning recipes, navigating grocery shopping, meal planning, food storage, knife skills/safety, kitchen cleanliness, and cooking skills.
• Laundry: Learning to use machines, buying appropriate cleaning materials, and knowing how to sort/treat laundry.
• Household maintenance: Knowing which cleaning items to buy, how to use and how often to use cleaning items, changing light bulbs, plunging a toilet, hanging a picture, flipping the breaker, and basic information on heating, smoke alarms, light bulb switching, etc.
• Personal hygiene: Oral/hair/skin care, changing clothes, bathing, and wearing deodorant or not.
• Regular sleep cycles: How much sleep do they need? How to get the best quality sleep sustainably?
• Medication adherence: Develop a plan for determining if they have properly taken their medications, if relevant.
• Communal living (i.e., dorms). Sharing spaces with others, cleaning responsibilities, how to resolve differences.
• Time and energy management: Balancing skills/chores (i.e., cooking, laundry, personal hygiene, etc.) in general and with work/school obligations.

Learning Independence

In addition to immediate life skills, they may be moving towards living more independently. These skill areas will need time and support to develop, including breaking concepts and processes down into small steps that are explicitly communicated, examples, and likely repetition.

• Keeping track of tasks and commitments: Experiment using calendars, checklists, and digital and analog methods to find the simplest ways of recording tasks and commitments and remembering them when needed.
• Budgeting: A potentially difficult task for our LD clients can be budgeting. They may need your help learning how to build a spreadsheet and what to put on the spreadsheet– including how to estimate the level of detail required, track spending, and adjust spending reasonably.
• Navigating public transit or learning to drive.
• In case of emergency: How to note the locations of local hospitals and clinics, important phone numbers, and an emergency evacuation plan.
• Communication: Keeping in touch with people socially in sustainable (non-exhausting) ways, writing professional emails, starting conversations with new people/strangers, and using the postal service.
• Finances: Paying bills/writing checks, credit vs. debit, avoiding ID theft, student loans, and taxes.
• Personal information: Practicing a signature, location of important documents (Social Security (SS) card, LD paperwork, birth certificate, passport), memorizing SS number, and how to protect their privacy.
• Illness: Finding and choosing a doctor, understanding over-the-counter (OTC) medications, basic first aid, and understanding the differences between mild and severe illness.

Sexuality and Dating

Any discussion around sexuality, dating, and safety needs to include confidentiality to ensure the client feels comfortable discussing this topic. If parents have specific safety reasons for not wanting this topic addressed, those can be discussed. Still, in general, we advise that if a client is willing and interested in discussing romance, dating, and sexuality, it is healthier for all involved to be open and supportive about these discussions and not make assumptions about the ability of people with LD to date and have romantic relationships successfully.

Explore with your client their desires regarding friendships, dating, gender, and sexual identity. Some people with LD will not want to date, which must be validated as a legitimate preference. In contrast, others will actively want to pursue this and may want help with reading body language, understanding nuances such as sarcasm in communication, and managing new relationships. This is likely to be an uncomfortable area of discussion for many clients, and one of the most important recommendations is to listen to your client and be consistently clear and supportive about working with their priorities and goals rather than assumed ones based on normative standards. In our clinical experience, people with LD may have extra difficulties finding romantic relationships due to social challenges. Still, they can succeed with the right support and partner, as with other areas.

Don’t Assume Neurotypical Standards

Assuming neurotypical standards with sexuality, as with all other aspects of your LD clients’ lives, desires, or progressions, may hinder true understanding and support. For example, while “typical” high schoolers may be interested in dating, that may not be true for students with LD who are more focused on achieving academic clarity and success or simply are not interested or ready at this “normal” age.

Similarly, if someone with LD is interested in dating, the methods and progressions that may be “expected” may also not be suitable. For example, bars are not friendly to someone whose main skills are in verbal conversation rather than nonverbal body language. Their idea of a relationship may differ from “standard” expectations around the length of time spent with a partner, what kinds of activities would be fun to do as a date, or behavioral or environmental preferences around intimacy.

Directly discussing these specific aspects, as much as your client is comfortable, is key to helping them develop specific processes, plans, and skills to attempt dating. As with academics or non-romantic social engagement, discussing strategies and ideas and breaking these down into concrete and linear steps are the key to success for LD clients.

Mating Essential Reads

The Science of Online Dating

The Logical Way to Find a Life Partner

Dating Tips for LD People

LD relationship therapist and coach Benjamin Meyer, MSW, has several dating tips for LD people. He mentions the importance of working with social and/or therapeutic networks, mainly friends and peers, to explicitly discuss dating practices, norms, and behaviors and even act out dating scenarios to help people with LD get used to interpreting facial expressions and other body language in this specific context.

Meyers’ suggests engaging with potential dates via dating apps and using their strengths in attention to detail and memory to start conversations around details mentioned in their profiles rather than generic openers. This might allow clients to assess compatibility much more quickly in terms of interests, thus increasing the chances that an in-person date would have at least some known good topics of conversation to work with.

Once a relationship is established, it will be important to help your client think through how one decides when and how or if to self-disclose to a partner. This is an important issue without a correct answer. It will be important to talk together about your client's pros and cons at each time. One of the key factors around this decision is finding a romantic partner with whom the person with LD feels comfortable being very honest; ensuring clients prioritize communication skills with partners is key.

Miranda Melcher is an expert on neurodiverse inclusive education and a co-author of the book NVLD and Developmental Visual-Spatial Disorder in Children.