Occupational Therapy

Occupational therapy (OT) is an important component in improving a child’s cognitive, physical, and motor skills that may be impaired due to a variety of reasons including having autism, sensory processing disorder , seizure disorders, or a brain injury.

OT promotes the following occupations in children:

• Play- a main activity of childhood that influences motor, social communication, and cognitive development.
• Activities of Daily Living (ADL) - self-care skills including dressing, toileting, eating, bathing, sleeping, and grooming.
• Social Participation- social communication and interaction skills as well as awareness of the environment and the people within it.
• Education- the ability to attend to and interact with the environment as well as build fine motor and visual perceptual skills that support participation and learning.

OT supports children in improving the above occupations by:

• Building foundational skills such as sensory processing, motor and praxis, emotional regulation, cognition, communication, and social skills.
• Using specialized equipment and playful sensory-motor activities to provide the “just right” challenge for children as they develop skills through participation in their occupation.
• Focusing greatly on sensory processing, which refers to a child’s ability to take in information from the environment and to appropriately process and respond to the sensory information.  Sensory processing is seen through a child’s ability to respond to, engage with, and learn about his or her body and how it relates to the surrounding world.  As children learn to functionally process and integrate sensory information, they are more capable of successfully interacting with their environment and those around them, and ultimately increase participation in daily occupations.
• Utilizing a comprehensive interdisciplinary developmental framework by collaborating with speech-language pathologists, physical therapists, developmental therapists, teachers, parents, siblings, and peers to generalize skills across different contexts.
• Providing one-on-one therapy sessions.

In order to best support the above objectives, our OTs create a plan tailored to your child’s individual needs taking into account your child’s strengths, challenges, developmental level, and sensory profile.  It is our belief that helping a child become more self-sufficient in their play, self-care, and social interactions will lead to a more positive and confident individual.