Breaking Down Multi-Step Skills
In fact, many of the skills you will want to teach your child have two or more parts. When teaching a new skill, you should think carefully about what is involved in the skill. Once you have thought about it, you can break the skill down into a series of steps. It is often easiest to teach only one new step at a time. Breaking skills down is especially important when teaching self-help routines like dressing or tooth-brushing that have many steps. Identifying all the steps in a task like these is called “task analysis.”
We will not show you how to teach many routines like this in this program. However, we want to briefly explain how to break skills down, so you can try it for yourself. There is also a lot of information on the internet. For example, you could look up “task analysis tooth brushing” or “task analysis put on pants” if you are interested in reading more on this topic.
To figure out the small steps that make up the skill or behavior you want to teach, do the behavior yourself very slowly. While doing the behavior, think about all the steps. The breaking down of skills into a series of smaller steps is called “task analysis.” That’s because the job of task analysis is to understand all the steps in a task, and then teach them, one at a time. Some tasks are easier to teach by chaining the steps in a forward direction. In other words, the same order you would do it in real life. This is sometimes called forward chaining.
For example, with tooth brushing, you could teach the child to get his toothbrush case. Do this by fading your prompts on this step first and reinforcing the child for his increasing independence. Until this first step is learned, you would prompt the rest of the steps as you go along. After the child is independent at getting his toothbrush case, you would work on the next step of opening the toothbrush case. You would save the reinforcer until after these first two steps are finished and so on.
Other tasks may be easier to teach using a backward chain. For example, with putting on pants that have an elastic waist, you would just do the steps yourself all the way through until the very last step. You would prompt your child to pull his pants up the last few inches, using a hand-over-hand prompt if needed. Then you can begin to fade your prompts. First you would fade your prompt on this very last step of pulling the pants from the hips up to the waist. 
Praise and reward the child for having finished the task of putting on his pants. Once that step is learned, you would work on pulling pants up from the knees. You can start each step with a hand-over-hand prompt if needed, and then give less help until the child can do this by himself. Even if he needs a hand over hand prompt, you would reinforce him for pulling up his pants from the knees with praise and/or a little treat. You continue to work through the steps of the routine in this way until the child can do all of the steps by himself.
There are many places on the Internet that explain how to teach your child multi-step skills like these. These will give you a basic introduction to these teaching methods. Look up the terms “task analysis” or “task analysis and chaining.” You can also search “task analysis for tooth-brushing” or “task analysis for washing face” etc. You should be able to find many examples and instructions. You will also find some video clips that show how to do this. However, doing task analysis well will require some skill. If you have a behavior analyst working with your child, he or she should be able to show you how to teach many routines. If not, try to keep the multi-step skills as simple as possible. Use as few steps as possible, and don’t teach more than one step and one skill at a time.