Responsibility

Being disabled does not exempt one from being responsible. On the contrary, I think it’s even more important to teach him to be responsible. I feel that learning to be responsible is part of the journey in learning to be independent.

Responsibility – I think that’s a big word for a 4 or 5 year old child. But I think the younger I start training him to be responsible, the better. I agree with my father in law who told me of a saying, the essence of which is that character building should start young (forgive me, I’m very “banana” so I’m unfamiliar with Chinese sayings).

Picking up his toys

I learnt from his playgroup about 2 years ago, a good habit of only having one toy out at a time. That meant keeping something before taking another out. It took a long time of inculcating this habit (partly because I wasn’t consistent!). But eventually, he accepted that this is the rule, and helps in keeping his toys away when I ask him to. Yes, I still have to ask him to do it, and I do it together with him. If I’m in a hurry, he will do it himself when asked to (place pieces into the box), but I’ll then come back to keep the box in its rightful place.

Tidying up before bedtime

This is another habit that took a long time to inculcate, but I’ve begun to see results. Recently, he started clearing up things. For e.g. he’d ask where he should keep a forgotten piece of toy he discovered; or he’d keep my ruler away and throw bits of scrap paper (from making flashcards together).

Some of these habits will come in very useful soon cos I’m aiming to do away with a live-in helper (when I’m no longer his shadow aide).

Clearing his dining table

I’ve introduced this habit only recently when I noticed that he’s interested in the on-goings of the household (e.g. observing the washing up of plates). His motor skills aren’t good yet, so I only allow him to take his plastic bottle or his feeding hanky to the sink. But he has surprised me by taking a small plate to the kitchen. He’s so into this now that he also wants to take the heat absorbent placemat to the kitchen.

Setting his dining table

This was something I didn’t initiate to teach him. One day he observed there was a fork short and promptly brought one over. After a few more times of bringing over missing cutlery, today, I let him bring over all the cutlery needed. By the way, it’s only myself and him at his tiny table.

Neat and tidy (no littering)

He’s learnt this habit well from a young age. Now, he’ll pick up bits of paper or whatnot off the floor and throw it into the bin. Unfortunately, he’s also picked up some fluff and threw it into the new air filter! LOL. I’ve since explained that mistake to him.

School had recently taught about litter in their moral class so it’s been reinforced even more which is good. Today, at the end of music class, I gave him a piece of tissue to wipe his sticky hands (he had a gummy sweet) and went out to get his shoes. When I came back he had already thrown the tissue into the bin at the other end of the hall, without me telling him to do so. I was surprised cos I didn’t even know that he knew where the bin was. Perhaps another adult told him to?

Laundry bin

During the period of changeover of helper, I set up a separate laundry bin for his dirty clothes. Since then he has been happily putting (most of) his dirty clothes in there. Of course, I praise him each time he does that, to encourage him more.

Financially responsible

I did not set out to teach him this at his young age. He happened to pick it up the simpler aspects of it through observation. I thought the two examples below were amusing:

At Jusco during a sale, the display of kids VCDs, (the Word World VCD) caught my eye. So without thinking much, I casually said “Hey, there’s Word World! Do you have this episode?” while picking it up and showing it to him. Without missing a beat, he responded like an adult “Got offer or not?”

This other example happened today, and is more about taking care of things and not quite about financial responsibility, but I thought it amusing:

He was looking at a new toy police car (thanks Adnan!) in his hand and said “must take care, it’s expensive”. Ah, mama must have said something like that often enough in the past! LOL.

(It’s ever so important to lead by example! He’s already caught me out a few times for not “walking the talk” LOL)

WIP (Work in progress)

There are so many more things to teach him that it's not possible to list them here. There are also so many things for me to learn to teach him - eg. today at music class, I realised that I should teach him that it's his responsibility to learn as a student.

It’s a slow process to teach him about responsibility, requiring a lot of repetition/consistency and leading by example. I’m glad though, that we’ve already started on it.