Welcome to our Seasonal Life Skills Series, where we will be focusing on the topic of life skills through a seasonal lens. In Part 1, we will be exploring why it is important to view life skills through a seasonal lens and the ways that different seasons can impact both the life skills that are relevant to us and which life skills are relevant to us.

Life skills are widely agreed upon as an important component of working toward independent living and increased personal autonomy. 

As much effort as we might put into teaching and learning life skills in meaningful, practical settings, one context that can be overlooked at times is the impact that the time of year can have on all we do, including what may be demanded of the skillset we have developed. 

Preparing students for life skills with seasonality in mind can make a big difference in how students prepare and how prepared they feel when the time comes to navigate those situations independently!

It is worth noting here that there are also life skills that might remain static throughout the year, but to which we might apply a seasonal flavor to keep things interesting. That is a worthwhile exercise for those types of life skills, and also not the center of our focus in this series. Instead, we want to focus on life skills that are unique to specific times of year or that change considerably based on the time of year. So let’s dive in!

Season-specific life skills are a crucial component of independent living, and some might be very specific to your life or the life of someone you are supporting, while others might apply much more broadly. 

How do you handle snow in the driveway? What do you need to prepare for a hot and sunny day? What sensory tools become more important during pollen season? How does your budget look if your income often changes based on the season? What about every May, when the park has an old-fashioned outdoor movie screening on Thursday nights, and you can see it through your window, and it throws off your whole sleep schedule if you can’t block it out?

In some cases, we might pick up these seasonal skills intuitively without thinking about it, but it’s not necessarily intuitive to everyone! And even if we might know in theory it’s important to shovel snow from a driveway, it’s still important to know how to do so effectively if you live in an area where snow affects you! 

So when considering life skills through a seasonal lens, always make sure to consider those life skills specifically associated with a particular time of year!

How do we want to dress? What do we want to eat? How should we prepare our food? When do we need to wake up? The answer to these questions can be static sometimes, but oftentimes is dependent on the time of the year! 

Much like needing to remember that some life skills are specific to certain times of year, either by personal circumstance or by the nature of the season, it is also important to remember how many life skills change based on the time of year. 

Sometimes our personal preferences change between seasons, while other times our sensory needs necessitate changes. Sometimes, even if we try our very best to keep everything the same, outside factors like changes to how public transportation works between seasons or weather necessitate it.

Holidays do not always come with specific life changes to existing life skills or their own unique life skills, but those that do can often be the most stressful. 

Holidays are the time when we are most often expected or asked to make major adjustments to our schedule, adhere to rigid traditions we may not be particularly fond of, or carry out unique and special tasks that we only have the opportunity to do once or twice per year. 

While we want to point out here and do point out in our free Holidays Toolkit that the holidays should not obligate us to do things we do not want to do, even the very existence of a holiday might require us to practice specific self-advocacy skills that only come up once per year. 

While they might not be something we have the need or energy to practice all the time, taking time to consider what specific holidays might ask of our life skillset that is different from the norm can go a long way toward feeling prepared for those moments!

We hope this brief overview has offered a helpful snapshot of some of the broad ways that the life skills we employ can be a product of the time of year and even a specific holiday we are in. 

If you would like to share your own thoughts on how your life skills are impacted by the time of year or want to see us cover this topic in a toolkit, then we would love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and stay tuned for Parts 2 through 4, where we will be discussing times of year when our life skills usually require the most flexibility.