This is the place to discuss Chapter 2
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION FROM DAYNA
Chapter 2 elements of a comprehensive plan
--a summary
Independent living skills have to types of living skills
1.hard or concrete skills
2.soft or intangible skills
Hard skills are: job employment, job maintenance, educational or vocational, money-management, home maintenance, consumer skills legal rights responsibilities, locating using community resources, healthcare, transportation, parenting and getting housing.
Soft skills are: self-esteem or image enhancement, conflict resolution communication, decision-making, problem-solving, goal setting or planning, interpersonal relationships, anger management, social skills separation and loss, time management and dealing with discrimination.
There are four-to-six phases of independent living skills throughout a youth's life, and they are as follows:
Phase 1
--Basic living skills are acquired informally by observing family members and repeating techniques observed through trial and error
.
Phase 2
--Basic skills acquired through formal instruction like formal class activities in school or extracurricular activities using someone outside of the house to provide these instructions
.
Phase 3
--Learning is primarily experimental. The youth's living arrangements may change and so that they move out of their primary care home into what’s called a protected environment. Examples include going to college and living in the dormitories or entering the military and living in barracks.
Phase 4
--When the safety net is removed, most learning will come across as the financial distinction between (a) living at home or living in a provided protective environment versus (b) being able to afford the roof over their head
by working.
Phase 5
--Involves returning to phase 3 for some reason. Some times unplanned bad luck happens, and that is when youth find that they must move back into the supervised independent living situation.
Phase 6
--Returns to being self-sufficient. The youth take the necessary steps to jump back into the workforce and being financially independent
.
We (the Envision Success Board members) need to provide special training for our primary caregivers so that they are better able to use daily living experiences in teaching basic skills
.
FOR DISCUSSION
If we wish to stand out from regular foster parents agencies, our foster parents or host home parents must be able to use daily experiences to teach independent living skills, and when necessary to create experiences that help the youth learn independent living skills
. So we have two items to discuss about this:
1. When do young people need to begin learning independent living skills? Some authorities suggest that that ages 16 to 18 is too late. That could mean that we need to be focusing on starting with youth 11 to 15. Once they are in the 16 to 18 range, can we really help them? What are your thoughts about the ages of the youth we start with?
2. When do we start training the foster parents and host home parents? What will be our curricula for them? We have a good list of what we want the youth to learn, but what will our training materials look like for the parents?