Social Skills: Washing Your Hair

1. Get all of your hair totally wet by standing under the shower water.

2. Pour a little bit of shampoo in your hand about the size of a nickle. (If you have more hair, then maybe you need a quarer's worth).

3. Using your fingers, rub in the shampoo by massaging your scalp. Make sure you get the shampoo all over your hair.

4. Stand under the water to rinse the shampoo totally out of your hair until the water no longer looks sudsie. The instructions on the shampoo bottle says to do this process again. I don't do this unless I have something actually in my hair like sand.

5. Do the same process with conditioner (if you use conditioner to keep your hair from getting tangled and to make it smooth). Put conditioner in your hand about the size of nickel. Maybe less.

6. Massage the conditioner into all of your hair until you feel like you have covered your whole head.

7. Then rinse all of the conditioner out of your hair by standing under the water again. You hair will feel less smooth once the conditioner is all rinsed out. Make sure none is left because if you leave conditioner in your hair, it will not look clean once your hair dries. And then you will have defeated your purpose.

8. Then your hair is clean. Good job.

These may seem like obvious steps for kids. But if you have Asperger's, you sometimes don't catch on to things like the process of washing your hair. I mean, we have lots of other things we are thinking about...all the time....a lot.

When I was a kid, I used to get into trouble for not washing my hair even though I had washed it. Or my hair not looking clean. I didn't know what I was doing wrong. Then my parents told me these steps. Now I just have to remember to wash it.