Ten everyday tasks your teenager could be doing, and how to hand each one over
You make the sandwich because the bus comes in eleven minutes. You send the text to the orthodontist because your teenager will not, and the appointment is real. You do the thing because doing the thing takes ninety seconds and teaching the thing takes six weeks.
Every parent does this. It is not a failure of ambition for your child, it is arithmetic, and most mornings the arithmetic wins.
The study everyone reaches for, and what it found
A follow-up analysis of 779 students with disabilities who had taken part in group-randomized, control group studies of self-determination interventions in secondary school looked at what happened after they left. Self-determination status when exiting high school predicted positive outcomes in the domains of achieving employment and community access one year post-school (Shogren, Wehmeyer, Palmer, Rifenbark and Little, The Journal of Special Education, 2015).
That finding gets stretched, so here is its actual shape. It is a finding about self-determination, a measured construct about acting on your own behalf. It is not a finding that any particular household task produces employment. The outcomes measured were employment and community access, at one year post-school. The sample was 779 students with disabilities, not an autism-specific group. And no study links the ten tasks below to an employment outcome, because nobody has run that study.
Here is the encouraging part. Nobody is asking you to change ten things, and the direction the study points in is smaller than it sounds. The list below is a menu rather than a curriculum, and one item off it is a real month's work.
Choosing one is most of the method here. Each item comes with the smallest version of itself rather than the finished version, because the smallest version survives a Tuesday when nothing else has gone to plan. A task your teenager half does on their own is further along than one nobody has started.
Ten tasks, grouped by what the research measured
The two outcome domains in that study were employment and community access. The grouping below is ours, not the study's, and it exists to make the list easier to choose from, not to make a claim.
Community access
1. Ordering their own food. Start smaller than the whole interaction: your teenager says the order, you handle everything else. Drive-through is often harder than a counter, because there is no face and a time limit.
2. Paying and taking the change. A separate skill from ordering, and it fails for different reasons. Start with exact cash so counting change is not part of it yet.
3. Getting themselves somewhere familiar. One known route. Walking, a bus line they have ridden with you twenty times, or a rideshare booked while you are in the room.
4. Asking a stranger one question. Where is the restroom. Do you have this in a large. The point is a single scripted exchange with a person who is not you, not open-ended conversation.
Money and work readiness
5. Knowing what things cost. Before spending, before budgeting. Whether a coffee is two dollars or twenty is its own piece of knowledge and it is missing more often than people assume.
6. Managing one recurring amount. A set amount at a set interval, theirs to spend or not. Small enough that a bad decision is a bad week rather than a problem.
7. Sending one routine message. Confirming a shift, telling a coach they will be late, replying to a group text about a time. A message with a purpose, sent by them.
8. Following a written sequence without you reading it aloud. This one carries the most weight of anything on the list, because almost every job is a written or spoken sequence and someone who can follow one independently needs a different kind of workplace support than someone who cannot.
At home
9. One meal, start to finish, including the cleanup. Cleanup is not a bonus round. It is the part that makes it a complete task rather than a supervised activity, and it is the part usually taken back.
10. Their own laundry, on their own schedule. The schedule is the skill. Doing laundry when told is a different thing from noticing there are no clean shirts.
Why that study is a reason to start rather than a promise
Self-determination in this literature is a measured construct rather than a personality description. It covers acting on your own behalf: making a choice, setting a goal, working at a problem in front of you, knowing what you need and asking for it. The tasks above are ordinary places where that capacity gets used, which is not the same as saying any one of them produced the outcome. Almost everything written on this subject blurs those two things together.
It was a follow-up analysis of students who had already been through those secondary school studies, looking at where they had landed a year later. It shows a relationship between where a young person was at school exit and two adult outcomes. The sample was students with disabilities across categories, not an autism-specific group, and no study has connected these ten particular tasks to employment.
The capacity to do things for yourself, built before high school ends, showed a relationship to employment and to community access. That is a reason to start now rather than at nineteen, and not a promise about any individual child.
Where this is already supposed to be written down
Federal regulation requires that the IEP, beginning not later than the first one in effect when your child turns 16, include measurable postsecondary goals based on age appropriate transition assessments related to training, education, employment, and where appropriate independent living skills (34 CFR 300.320(b)). Independent living is one of the three named areas.
If your teenager is at that age, some version of this is already supposed to exist on a document you can ask to see.
Why number eight sits at the light end of a scale
When a BCBA talks about your teenager doing a task, they are rarely asking whether your child can do it. They are asking how much support is in play, and support comes in kinds: physically guiding a hand, showing the step, gesturing at the next item, saying the next step out loud, or a written or picture list your child reads on their own. That last one is where item eight lives. Everything before it needs a person standing there.
Handing a task over is usually not a switch from you doing it to them doing it. It is moving from one kind of support to a lighter one, on purpose, in an order.
Which kind to remove first, and how fast, is a clinical decision. It depends on your child, the task, and what the current program is already working on. This article names the tasks and the smallest place to start. Your child's BCBA is the person to build the sequence, and asking them to is a reasonable request.
How to hand one over without it becoming a fight
Whichever one you pick, six weeks is about the horizon to hold, and the most common way this goes wrong is starting with six tasks at once and abandoning all of them by the end of the month.
Decide in advance what you will not do, and write it down somewhere you will see it. In the moment, with everyone tired and the bus coming, the temptation is to step in, and having already decided makes it easier than deciding again.
Then let it be worse for a while. The sandwich will be bad and the laundry will come out pink. That is the real cost of this and there is no version that skips it.
Say what happened rather than how they did. "You ordered and paid" travels further than "good job." One is a record. The other is an evaluation.
What to ask your BCBA
What kind of support are we using for this task right now? Ask them to name the level in their own language, so you are both starting from the same description rather than from "he needs help with it."
What comes off first, and how quickly? This is the sequence question, and it is theirs to answer rather than yours to guess at.
What is my teenager already working on that this task touches? A daily living task usually overlaps something in the current program, and knowing which part means you are practising the same thing at home rather than a second, competing thing.
What would this look like broken down in my kitchen? Ask for the version that happens at your counter on a Tuesday, not the principle behind it.
How will we know it is working? Their answer tells you what to write down, which turns six ordinary weeks into information rather than a vague sense of how it went.
Who else should know we are working on this? A grandparent, a sibling, a teacher, a job coach. Anyone who steps in and finishes the task is not doing anything wrong, they simply have not been told yet.
What to do this week
Choose one task from the list, and let it be the one your teenager is most likely to want rather than the one that would help you most. Motivation does more work here than method does.
Then write down what support is happening right now. Are you doing it, guiding their hands, showing them, gesturing at the next step, saying each step out loud, or is there something written that they follow on their own. That description is what a BCBA needs from you, and it is the thing most parents cannot answer on the spot.
Bring both of those to your child's clinical team. "We want to work on ordering food, this is where we are, what comes off first and how will we know when to move" is a request somebody can act on. "How do we make him more independent" is much harder to act on, however reasonable it is to feel.
And if your teenager is 16 or older, ask where independent living shows up in the IEP. It is often the thinnest of the three areas named in the federal requirement.
The thing worth holding onto
Nobody hands over ten tasks. The families where this works hand over one, badly, for six weeks, and then another one.
Your child does not need you to have started this three years ago. They need one task, chosen this week, and the tolerance to let it be done worse than you would do it.
Want a clinical team that builds independence into the plan?
Forta's BCBAs work on daily living skills in the setting where they have to hold, which is your home.
Forta provides Online ABA therapy in 47 states, and In-Home ABA therapy in select cities including Houston, TX.
Sources
- Shogren K.A., Wehmeyer M.L., Palmer S.B., Rifenbark G.G., Little T.D. "Relationships Between Self-Determination and Postschool Outcomes for Youth With Disabilities." The Journal of Special Education, 48(4), 2015. Link
- 34 CFR §300.320(b), Transition services. U.S. Department of Education. Link
About this article
Written by Will Africano, VP of Marketing · Clinically reviewed by Crista Conboy, MA, BCBA · 2026-08-27
What this is. General information, reviewed by a BCBA. It is not clinical advice about your child. What works for one child often does not work for another, and your child's BCBA is the person who can tell you which of this applies.
