From Buttons to Zippers: Nurturing Self-Dressing Skills in Children

Encouraging your Child's Independence can be as Easy as Getting Dressed in the Morning!

"The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence." - Denis Waitley

Many children want to be independent... opportunities for self-dressing can support their independence and help develop fine motor skills. As your child develops, they eventually hit the independence stage where they want to dress themselves. They tend to quickly get frustrated as they do not have the skills required for these tasks. Most self-dressing skills don't fully develop until between the ages of 2-4; however, by 18 months, children should be able to pull off their socks and assist in putting their arms through their shirt. By age 4, most of these skills will be mastered with ease. A lot of children want to be independent, especially around the age of 2, and allowing opportunities for self-dressing can help support independence, practical life skills, and develop fine motor skills. I have come across a few tips, tricks, and activities I wanted to share to help you navigate this new stage with your child with ease.

Let's start with socks since this is the first item most children learn to take off first! An activity to help your child learn how to put socks on is to use scrunchies and let them work on trying to get their foot through the scrunchies until it is around their ankle. In this activity, they are learning to pull the scrunchies out like you would hold a sock on to get your toes through, while still having a similar elastic stretch. If you analyze putting a sock on, this is usually the hardest part; then they just have to push their foot while pulling the scrunchy more onto their foot like a sock. This activity uses the same muscles and techniques as putting a sock on, but since scrunchies are quick to put on, your child will be able to practice many times without getting overwhelmed. You could make it a game and play with them, see how many scrunchies they can get on their foot before the timer goes off!

Our next activity will focus on pants. Learning how to pull pants on and off is important as most children are learning how to use the bathroom between the ages of 2 and 4. The first tip to help your child navigate putting pants on is to teach them to put the tag of the pants to the floor when they lay them out. The next tip is to have them sit on a stool; this allows them to stretch their legs through the pants without losing their balance and tipping over, allowing more space for their legs to work. The area to focus on when learning how to take their pants off is getting your child to work on sticking their thumbs in the pants by their hips and pushing the pants down to at least their knees. Then, sit on the floor and grab the ends of the pants to pull on to get their legs out.

Now for the shirt, the goal is to focus on them putting their head through the head hole, then reaching their arms in to put through the arm holes. At the beginning, they may get the shirt on backwards; pick your battles. If this is a big win, celebrate the fact they got the shirt on themselves. Getting it on in the right direction will come with time!

Zippers! Oh, the joys of children and zippers. I say that with a little bit of sarcasm! I think children are very fascinated by the sound and the way a zipper comes together, which usually intrigues them to want to do it themselves, but it is a BIG challenge at first! In the beginning, the easiest way to help them learn how to put a zipper together is to set it up so they can see it straight on using a chair. Use a small chair and hang the jacket on the chair so they can stand in front of the jacket and put it together. For reference, I have added a photo above. Yes, you will need to show them many times, but having it in front of them makes it easier to see, and having it over the chair allows the jacket to not have too much extra space where it moves a lot. As for helping your child learn how to put the jacket on, the jacket flip will be your best bet! Lay the jacket open out on the floor in front of them with the head/hood close to their feet. Guide them to put their arms straight out and hands in the holes, then flip it over onto their body. If they have not done it before, then it is about to be their new favorite way of putting a jacket on.

The final activity is for learning how to navigate shoes. The first tip for teaching your child how to put a shoe on is teaching them to pull the tongue of the shoe out as much as they can, since it allows more space to put their foot in. The second area to focus on is to remind them to put a finger in the back of the shoe before they fully slide their foot in so the back doesn't fold in and down. From there, most children's shoes are either velcro or lace-up. Most children can fold the velcro down with ease and don't usually need too much practice. Shoelaces, on the other hand, are a whole new area of development. The company Melissa and Doug has a very handy shoe to use for practice. I have used this shoe with many children to help them learn how to tie. It resembles a shoe well with realistic laces, and the wooden frame helps it be very sturdy when learning. This shoe is handy to get and practice with, and the reward after mastering how to tie could be to go pick out new shoes with laces. If your child already has shoes with laces, they could also practice on their own shoes. One of the harder parts for children with shoes is getting them on the right feet. I would suggest cutting a sticker in half and putting half the sticker in the heel of each shoe. They have to line up the shoes to form the full picture of the sticker before putting their shoes on, helping get the right shoe on the right foot. Simple stickers with recognizable pictures are best, such as a car or a bear.

Learning how to dress themselves requires a lot of fine motor skills! Playing with play dough, peeling painter's tape off the table, playing with stickers, using a hole puncher while doing art, threading objects onto strings, or using tongs, clothespins, or tweezers to pick up objects like pom poms are all activities to help develop these fine motor skills during their play. Having a bin of dress-up clothes like past Halloween costumes for playing can also help encourage them to learn how to get dressed.

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