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How a person's day is organized contributes to his or her quality of life. Some people choose to go about their day in a highly structured manner, whereas others choose to function in a more unplanned fashion. Many residential programs, however, do not take these types of life-style preferences into consideration when designing daily activity or routine schedules. Guidelines are presented for individualizing each person's daily schedule of routines to reflect better his or her preferred lifestyle. In so doing, increased control over daily life will be offered to each person. Manipulation of an individual's daily routine also represents a nonintrusive, multicomponent strategy for reducing challenging behaviors and increasing meaningful participation in daily life. The routine schedule offers a method of incorporating information from functional analysis into natural contexts across the day. Four dimensions are presented that can be systematically manipulated as independent variables to address challenging behavior in community residences. Examples are presented to demonstrate the application of schedule manipulations.

An interview was conducted with each of four mothers to gain an understanding of their perceptions of the educational and behavioral history of their children leading up to placement in a residential facility that used aversive interventions, including contingent electric skin shock. Semistructured instruments were used to understand each family's "story." These mothers, each of whom indicated wanting to remove their child from the facility, reported about their experiences prior to placement in the facility and their experiences while their child was in residence at the facility. In general, these mothers felt there was little support for their child or themselves throughout the years prior to the placement; they had minimal participation or say in their child's programs, and they had no real choice in their child's ultimate placement in the facility that used aversive interventions. Mothers also reported experiencing little choice (along with significant coercion) regarding their child's program at this facility. As a result of this preliminary work, recommendations for future research and practice are discussed.