Some ideas we use at this house to better use his phone/device(s) for independent #GoodAdultLife skills: Managing calendar tasks and events, wordsmithing social media posts, keeping a blog of what they have learned, tracking achievement through graphs, developing a stronger sense of intrinsic motivation via friendly competition, making phone calls, finding links, responding daily to email, and taking the initiative with online shopping.

I can encourage my child to better build relationships (and correlations) out in the world, read for greater purpose, and make it his job to keep finding meaningful ways to own numbers in every possible way.  And if parents are a bit rusty, it can also benefit caregivers to brush up on these digital skills. Friendly competition is a dandy motivator. I call out, “I’m gonna win!” He yells back, “no, you aren’t!”. Game on!

• Parents:  Log out your personal accounts on your child’s devices.  Help them set up their own accounts for independence. As my son learns more responsibility in all this, I can back off using my email and instead use his more often…. we are not there yet. Sometimes different logins and passwords are confusing. Dare I say, repetition? I often facilitate the same learning over and over. Patience, please.
• Set up a debit card (GreenLight, Modak, etc.) It will be linked to you, but will have separate logins. Tie chores to deposits.
• Create a list of 5 things to work on this week to more widely use devices/phone for something useful, add 1 new one each day.
• Transportation? (Uber, Lyft, neighborhood rides, buses)
• Get a list app. I use Note Everything daily! Make a list of small business entrepreneurial ideas:  helping older generations with errands, gardening and deliveries, technology skills. Grow the work skills your child already has.
• Use text messaging for their independence (remove yourself as a layer). If anyone asks me a question about John and he is standing right there, I turn to him and let him answer.
• Use old-fashioned phone calls and calendars. Use separate accounts, daily checking of emails and messages. Yes, it’s overlap: paper and digital. Someday, you can fade one.
• Set up Find My Device in case you need to …..
• Set up a “safe” social media account or two, to practice building content on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. I helped my son set up two with his branding. (Check out @JFMadDrummer (purpose=music) and @JFMadMoves (purpose=movement), which I can monitor randomly. And we follow each other.
• Use apps for organization and tracking daily activities. We are both Google, but we don’t share a calendar (yet).
• Incorporate every possible way to use numbers and data visualization into daily routine. More apps and uses pop up daily.
• Start a blog or substack to create simple content, practice typing, composition and spelling, with the goal of building confidence and interest in education essays and workplace technology. It also gives them something very personal to talk about, brag about, during those dreaded moments of social small talk.
• Use all tools to help them adapt to and encourage schedule changes. At our house, we live by “it’s OK to be scared. Just be scared and BRAVE at the same time.”
• Use graphs and visual aids to better understand numbers and patterns. If they are still in concrete and pictorial learning, it really helps. Even timers. Remember Time Timers? (thumbnail below)
• In conversations and family meetings (you do have family meetings, right?), respond to questions by using questions back, encouraging independence rather than robotically seeking answers from others.
• Discuss importance of everyone “un-teaching” behaviors learned from years of school training and therapy, including prompt dependence. Don’t answer questions for them. It’s a slippery slope…..
• Use every opportunity to empower independent thinking. It will take them longer.
• Use a note-taking app like “Note Everything” to help manage grocery lists and other organization tools.
• Practice playful competitiveness and banter to lessen defensiveness and to build Social EQ.
• Utterly limit shared logins.  They need to feel the burden to build real habits of responsibility.
• Use positive language to increase self-esteem, intrinsic motivation and emotional vocabulary, suggesting terms like pride and satisfaction to describe feelings about work. They may not yet know what certain feelings are labeled. “That feeling you have now is called …. “
• Plan meals and map out daily chores.  At our house, we say, “match calendars” day-by-day. We don’t show Google shared calendars on his phone.  I want him to enter the data by hand,, the long way, for mastery.
• What about continuing academic education?  We use IXL.com for daily math ($10/month est.) and 15 minutes daily reading.  eBooks can count
• Ask peers, neighbors and coworkers how they use their phones, to re-direct the “anyone but Mom” syndrome.
• In all ways, let them build their expressive universal language (emergencies, medical, in-service training opportunities). They can look up word definitions. Google = Dictionary.

What are some other ways you use in your family?

Gayle