Personal Care

Learning how to say no is an important part of learning to protect yourself. Learning how to say no to different people who provide support as carers is also important. Especially across environments. Especially as you get older. Some settings provide physical boundaries to help with safety such as fences for boundary lines of properties. Others surprisingly don’t have these. Some homes allow parents to easily watch those in their care whilst others require the parents to be in the room otherwise they can’t see what is happening. The design and layout of our homes supports the understanding of how personal care works. Is it easier because of the actual physical size of a child’s bedroom to get dressed out in the living room where an adult can easily stand to help. Is it easier for the child to get undressed in their bedroom before walking down the hallway to the bathroom. When young these can be typical time and efficiency saving routines. When older and when needing to transfer these skills to other environments this can place the individual at risk. Personal safety is easier to identify with some types of every day tasks. Yet with others it is dependent on the permission given to us by others. Personal care is also how you take care of your own health. Do you say no to the food offered at a meal because it makes you feel sick or do you be respectful because your role is that of someone who is taken care of by others? Hidden within layers of roles and who is responsible for making decisions about what others do and don’t do can be personal care issues. Being able to identify symptoms of ill health can then require an individual to communicate through those layers of roles and responsibilities which can be challenging when you don’t have the language to describe what is happening or when it is a situation that you don’t have control over.