Dressing skills are an important skill for children to learn and come under the ‘umbrella term’ of self-help skills or independent living skills. Children will learn to dress and undress themselves at different ages depending on a number of factors including their fine motor skills, their interest in the task and their want to be independent.

Most children who enjoy dressing can be taught to cooperate with it by the age of one, they will be able to hold their arms out to help and can remove their own socks, shoes and hats. Around the age of two children will be able to take off clothes without fastenings and be able to find the armholes in t-shirts. Three year olds will be able to dress themselves with simple garments e.g. t-shirts and elasticated trousers, put their arms in the sleeves of jackets and start to manage some zips and buttons. By the age of five or six most children will be able to dress themselves independently needing only a little help managing more complex fastenings such as buckles and laces.

When learning to get dressed there are a lot of different things children need to learn. They need to learn; how to put things on, how to do up fastenings (buttons, zips, poppers etc), which order clothes go on in (vest under t-shirt, pants before trousers etc), how to orientate their clothes (front and back / left and right / right way up / inside out).

Starting to teach dressing skills
The first thing to do when encouraging a child to develop independent dressing skills is to encourage them to assist you when they are getting dressed, get them to put their arms out for their coats and feet for their socks. At this stage, children are also starting to learn the names of the different items of clothing.

• Undressing is easier than dressing so start by encouraging your child to undress themselves – have a race to see if they can take their clothes off whilst you run the bath!
• Play with clothes dressing dolls or putting clothes on paper / magnetic dolls to practice the order clothes need to go on
• Lay out clothes in the correct sequence for dressing.
• Allow plenty of time – don’t try to make your child dress themselves when you are already running late for school or nursery.
• Start with simple clothes without fastenings, for example jogging bottoms and t-shirts.
• Talk through the actions and sequences and bring attention to body parts.
• Prompt your child to make use of visual clues to help orientate clothes, for example, labels on the back of clothes, logos on the front, coloured heels and toes on socks.

Buttons

• Play with threading activities, with cotton reels, beads and big buttons (working towards smaller items and thinner cords.
• Play posting games, like pennies in a piggy bank, letters in a postbox.
• Posting pennies through a slit in a square of paper / scraps of material, aiming into a tub.
• Practise with large buttons (toggle buttons are good) on a soft fabric initially.
• Encourage practicing buttons by putting toys, games and favourite things in bags with buttons.

Zips

• Play with purses and bags with zips.
• Put toys, games and favourite things in pencil cases or bags with zips.

The use of dressing skills dolls or dressing skills books means that the skill can be practiced at any time of day which is an advantage as it takes away the time pressure of needing to get dressed quickly.

Dressing tasks can also be taught by backward chaining. Backward chaining is when the task is broken into the component steps and the last step is taught first, this means that the child will always been successful as they will manage to successfully complete the task.

1. Pick up pants by waistband
2. Lower pants
3. Put left leg into the left leg hole
4. Put right leg into the right leg hole
5. Pull pants up to knees
6. Stand and pull pants to waist

The last step is step 6 – standing and pulling pants to the waist as this step is closest to the completion of the task in backward chaining this is the step that is taught first. They are, helped to put the pants on until the last step, which they are encouraged to complete independently. When the child can consistently complete this task, continue assisting a little less each time until they can complete the task entirely on their own. Other items of clothing can be taught in the same way until the child is able to put on each item of clothing.

There are also adaptive aids to help dressing for example sock or tights aids and long handed shoe horns which are useful where a child cannot reach their feet or where bending is painful or button hooks which can make doing up buttons easier.  A shoe mat will enable a child to orientate their shoes correctly. Pick up sticks and dressing sticks can also help to manipulate clothing but each child will need to devise their own techniques with the aids available. Larger pieces of equipment to assist with dressing include changing benches which the child sits astride with feet on the floor possibly with a helper sitting behind to offer extra stability, ladderback chairs which give scope for different sitting and standing positions and full length mirrors for poor self awareness / perceptual problems.