This charming family, who lives near Cleveland, has a delightful 19-year-old son, who was at Northwestern University. He is highly intelligent and functional, but had problems organizing his life. The university was aware of the situation and provided him with a tutor to help him with his scheduling and to follow his activities. 

The family thought it would be beneficial to their son if, after finishing university, he had a full-time residential private tutor in his new home to continue his studies and be independent. Tutors from England was asked to provide such a tutor and I was sent to Ohio to help the young man. 

As I say, he is a delight and a pleasure to teach; the problem was his lack of organization, priorities and decision making. I was with Philip for a year. At first I just taught him in the normal way – and he has above average intelligence, so the teaching was in no way a problem – and gradually I started to work on his organisation problems. 

I tried to let him do everything himself, and under my guidance, little by little, he seemed to gain confidence in himself and become less disoriented until he started to take control of his own life without my guidance, but it was indeed a very slow process. Almost every day there was a very slight improvement, sometimes barely noticeable. 

I achieved all this by tackling one small thing at a time. I started by dealing with his personal needs and teaching him how long each one took – what time he should get up to be ready at a certain time, what order he should do things in the mornings and from that we progressed onto dealing with unexpected things, such as when there was a change in routine. I had to teach him how to organize his entire life and cope with daily situations. We tackled tasks one by one. Once he had become accustomed to doing one on his own we progressed to the next one – always a single task at a time and slowly we built up more and more tasks that he was capable of doing on his own. It was a very long process that took a great deal of patience on his part and on mine, but it gave a great deal of pleasure to both of us when he succeeded in doing a new task on his own, so we could move onto the next one until he finally became reasonably capable of looking after himself in everything. 

It was a very satisfying year for me to see such improvements in him. MN