Examining Trajectories of Daily Living Skills over the Preschool Years for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Leezenbaum et al. (2019) followed preschoolers with autism for several years. They tracked daily living skills every few months with the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales.

The team wanted to see if these skills grew over time and whether initial autism severity changed the speed of that growth.

Daily living skills scores went up year after year. Kids who started with milder autism symptoms improved faster. Children with more severe symptoms still gained skills, just at a slower pace.

Matson et al. (2013) saw the same link in a single-time snapshot: preschoolers with an autism label scored lower on practical daily skills than kids without the label.

Dellapiazza et al. (2024) later showed that autism symptoms themselves can shift well past preschool. Together these studies tell a two-part story: daily living skills keep climbing, but social-communication symptoms may still move up or down.

Golos et al. (2022) compared participation levels and found ASD preschoolers joined structured self-care tasks often, yet still lagged behind typical peers. B et al. now show that, given time, those same tasks can improve if we keep teaching them.

You can reassure families that dressing, toileting, and brushing teeth usually get better between ages 3 and 6. Start goals earlier for children with higher baseline severity; they need more repetitions to reach the same endpoint. Track Vineland raw or growth-scale scores each quarter so small gains are visible even when standard scores creep up slowly.