Your youth can develop a vision for their future. By truly listening to your youth express what they want and don’t want, together you can take steps to plan for their best life.
Key things to know:
Your youth can build a vision for their best life.
Charting the LifeCourse can help you identify what is needed to reach that vision.
You want the best life for your youth. Helping your youth to build a vision for their best life can reinforce self-determination and provide motivation during transition planning. Developing a strong vision for your youth will ensure that everyone who supports them will be working toward the same goals. In this process you’ll consider the following questions:
What things are important to your youth to have their best life?
What does your youth need to build their best life?
What supports will help your youth live their best life?
Get to know Charting the LifeCourse
Charting the LifeCourse is a framework and system of tools developed for families by families that can help you and your youth envision what their best life looks like after high school and identify the resources and supports needed to reach that vision. LifeCourse helps parents, siblings and family members share their ideas, hopes, and fears for the future.
Charting the LifeCourse is about:
Having different conversations
Encouraging high expectations
Having life experiences to move in the desired direction
To support your loved one with a disability as they develop their best lives, consider the importance of self awareness. Self-awareness is critical for your youth as they develop and prepare for their independence and important decisions ahead. Youth who are more self-aware are better able to:
Understand who they are and what they stand for, including preferences, interests, needs and strengths
See what impacts them and how they impact others
Communicate their needs and ask for support
Make connections between life experiences and career goals
Set high expectations for themselves and accomplish their goals
The one-page profile (PDF) from Charting the LifeCourse can help your youth describe themselves and figure out who they are.
Does your youth speak up for themselves and the things that are important to them? Self-advocacy is one of the most critical skills you can help your youth attain in living their best life. A strong self-advocate knows their rights and responsibilities and speaks up for those rights. Self-advocates take responsibility for the choices they make and ask for help when needed.
Watch this 4 minute video and learn about different environments and experiences where these young people advocated for themselves in work, in school and with family.
Self-Advocacy
As a part of the transition planning process, you, your youth and their support team will identify their strengths and needs as they relate to the topics of Minnesota’s transition framework, and together decide which ones to prioritize.
The transition framework’s best life topics include:
Self-awareness
My strengths, interests, preferences, and needs
My resources (formal and informal)
My team (people who can help me create my best life vision)
Life vision
My best life vision
Budget for my best life
Connection to independent living, employment and postsecondary education and training
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