When the Usual Way Stops Working
Every family and every care team eventually runs into a self-care task that just isn't working. Toothbrushing becomes a daily battle. Bath time ends in tears. Getting dressed in the morning takes an hour and leaves everyone wrung out by the time they get out the door.
When this happens, it can feel like there are only two options: push harder and hope the child eventually gets used to it, or give up and accept that this is just how it is. Both options leave everyone feeling defeated.
There is a whole middle ground that often gets overlooked, and that is the space of adapting the task itself. Changing the position, the tool, the timing, the sensory experience, the person helping, or any number of other components so the task actually fits the child doing it.
Why Adapting Gets Treated Like a Lesser Solution
Adapting a task often gets treated like caving in. Like the child should really be able to do it the standard way, and accepting something different means accepting failure. That framing shows up in a lot of adult voices, sometimes including our own, and it gets in the way of solutions that would actually work.
Adapting isn't a last resort. It's one of several legitimate approaches that carry equal weight, and in many cases, it's the one that actually lets a child keep growing, keep building skills, and keep feeling like a capable person in their own life.
This course gives you a structured framework for generating adaptations, along with honest counter-statements for the fear-based thinking that can stop you from trying something different in the first place.
Big Talks, Little Talks
Understanding How Kids Think, Feel, and Behave — One Talk at a Time
100 Ways to Do Hard Things: How to Alter, Adapt, & Accommodate Tricky Tasks is one of eight modules in Big Talks, Little Talks, a video course series by Kelsie Mick Olds covering key topics in neurodiversity and child development. Modules can be purchased individually or as a complete bundle.
Every module in the series includes two videos:
The professional development component. Kelsie walks through the topic in depth, giving you the knowledge and language to understand what's happening and how to respond. Big Talks run approximately one hour and qualify for continuing education credit.
A kid-friendly video that gives children accessible language to understand what's going on in their own bodies and brains. You can show it directly to a child, break it into shorter chunks across multiple sessions, or watch it yourself to pick up language you can use in your own conversations.
Who Is This Course For?
This course is designed for therapists, parents, caregivers, educators, early childhood educators, and anyone who supports a child through daily self-care tasks that have turned into a source of stress, conflict, or burnout.
Whether you are in the middle of a specific impasse and need ideas today, or you want a framework you can return to any time a task stops working, this course gives you a practical, flexible toolkit and the mindset shift to use it.