“Promoting self-determination in childhood as a real guarantee that people, regardless of their abilities, can have a life project based on their individuality and can exercise control over themselves.”
Self-determination and its implications in childhood, adolescence, and adult life are increasingly appearing in research and in services for people with disabilities, due to the relevance that the expression and exercise of the right to self-determination has for all individuals.
Disability and self-determination
Based on the paradigm shift that has emerged in the world of disability, the importance of providing support and opportunities to foster this self-determination from childhood is highlighted.
In general terms, it is a construct that can ensure that in adult life, people with disabilities can set and achieve goals, make their own decisions, and participate more actively in the community, as full citizens.
From my point of view, it is important to dwell on this concept since it constitutes one of the eight dimensions of Schalock and Verdugo’s (2007) quality of life model and because it consists of the real guarantee that people, regardless of their abilities, can have a life project based on their individuality and can exercise control over themselves.
In this sense, advances in the philosophy and methodology of services, which are a consequence of changes in the consideration of disability and the recognition of their rights, have focused on the person, with the aim of understanding what is desirable for them and making it possible. In this way, we are seeing how services are transforming to adopt new approaches that are based on the premise that control should shift from those who provide the services to those who receive them.
Support for people with disabilities to achieve self-determination
The essential support for a person with few self-determination skills is to help them build a meaningful life project and coordinate a support network that helps them develop and fulfill that project. For this, I believe that Person-Centered Planning is the consolidation of this type of support, which becomes more essential the greater the support needs in the capacity for self-determination. That is, it is important to highlight that Person-Centered Planning is a methodology that gives effective power to the person and, in this sense, guarantees the right to self-determination and ensures that the person can be the protagonist of their life.
Self-determination from childhood
Likewise, we cannot lose sight of the fact that, in order to promote self-determination from childhood, it is also essential to assume that the context becomes a key factor that must allow a child with a disability to implement self-determination-related competencies. Undoubtedly, when we talk about the stage of childhood and adolescence, the family stands out as the main context that can foster these competencies and understand the child with a disability as an active member of the family, taking them into account when making decisions that affect the entire family and its individual members.
The family constitutes an interactive and interdependent system where what happens to one of its members affects the other members of the system, making it the main context in which human beings experience and deploy their first social interaction experiences, regardless of their abilities. There, the foundations for creating identity are laid and the development of individual capacities and potentialities that allow the construction of an autonomous subject is facilitated. In this sense, service providers, teachers, and professionals come and go, but the members of a family unit become the main natural support network, and their relationships are expected to be long-lasting.
Tips for promoting self-determination in childhood
For families, supporting self-determination implies opening up to new possibilities and having a deep belief in their children’s abilities. On a daily basis, some strategies that can promote the development of this autonomy can be:
- Offering choices of clothes or social activities.
- Helping them identify their strengths.
- Including them in joint decision-making.
- Allowing them to manage their own challenges or difficulties.
- Assuming that their possible error is part of learning and is not subject to the condition of disability.
- Fostering their autonomy.
For all that I have been highlighting, I believe that the family is a fundamental support that must constantly seek strategies and solutions to challenges related to the parenting process of their children, with or without disabilities, with the idea of promoting support and opportunities in terms of self-determination to ensure greater success in the transition to adult life.
In this sense, attending Family Therapy can be a good option for families to understand the situation they are immersed in, as well as to acquire certain tools that will help the development and well-being of all its members.