Recreation and Leisure Needs

Abstract

As more severely handicapped individuals are deinstitutionalized into the community (Gollay, Freedman, Wyngaarden, & Kurtz, 1978) or maintained in their natural families, the need for systematic program implementation of recreation skills has increased (Wehman, 1978; Wehman & Schleien, in press). The importance of recreational services has been observed frequently (Amary, 1975; Benoit, 1955; Stanfield, 1973; Wehman, 1977a). The critical nature of systematic assessment, skill selection, and instruction for leisure skills has only recently been noted, however (Snell, 1978; Wehman & Schleien, 1980; Ford, Brown, Pumpian, Baumgart, Schroeder, & Loomis, Note 1). Severely handicapped individuals usually include those with measured IQs between 0 and 40, and have been typically labeled as trainable mentally retarded, severely profoundly retarded, autistic, emotionally disturbed, deaf-blind, or multihandicapped. Most of these individuals exhibit substantial learning, behavior, and/or physical handicaps and therefore do not learn leisure skills without systematic instruction.