Create Opportunities

Giving learning and participation meaningful places to live

Participation Happens within Real Life

Everyday family life is already filled with opportunities for participation — within activities of daily living, family routines and responsibilities, relationships, recreation, community life, and the many meaningful moments within them.

Intentional Parenting begins by looking at the life already being lived: What is happening here? What matters within my family life? What might participation or belonging look like within this activity or moment? What could support it?

Everyday life is both where we begin and where participation has somewhere meaningful to be lived and learned.

Participation Need Not Wait for Mastery

A person does not have to independently master every skill before participating meaningfully in everyday life.

Participation itself can provide opportunities for learning and development.

With thoughtful supports, a child or adult may take part while learning within the activity — developing their own ways of belonging, while increasingly knowing, doing, and managing more over time.

Support, opportunity and continued participation can help growth occur within real life.

Sometimes We Create the Opportunity

Look first at the life already happening. And sometimes deliberately create something that isn't there yet.

Not every meaningful opportunity naturally appears within everyday family life.

Sometimes parents intentionally create experiences, routines, tools, or connections that open new possibilities for participation.

Creating an opportunity means asking: “What can we create that gives learning,

strengths, interests, and abilities somewhere meaningful to go?”

Create Access, Not Just Activities

Creating an opportunity is not simply finding an activity or meaningful moment.

It means considering how the person can meaningfully access and participate within the moment — what supports, adaptations, relationships, or arrangements might make that possible.

Belonging does not require everyone to participate in the same way.

Opportunities and Supports Work Together

An opportunity, such as an activity of daily life or any meaningful moment, may reveal where support is needed.

A thoughtfully built support may make an opportunity possible.

And participation within the opportunity can show us when supports should be adapted, advanced, or gradually shifted toward greater self-management.

We don't create supports in isolation. We build them for participation within life.

Ideas & Tools for Creating Living & Learning Opportunities

Journaling for Living & Learning
A shared activity that can support communication, awareness, memory, connection, and participation.

Participation Books
Ways of making family, friends, community, activities, and experiences more accessible for communication, connection, and participation.

Resume & Skills Portfolio
A way to make abilities, experiences, interests, and contributions visible — to the person and to others.

Participation Club
An evolving model for creating recurring, meaningful community participation with familiar people and individualized supports.

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Coming soon

These examples are not prescriptions for what every family should create.
Many of these ideas both create opportunities and provide supports for participation.
These are examples of creating what was needed, building supports for participation, and adapting over time as abilities
and life evolved.