Everyday activities like playing, learning, and exploring help children build important skills—but sometimes, kids need extra support to develop these abilities. That’s where pediatric occupational therapy comes in.
I am Kelly Toy, I’m an occupational therapist here at JLD Therapy. Today, we’re going to talk about what occupational therapy is and how it can help children build important skills.
Pediatric Occupational Therapy Helps Improve the Skills That Occupy Your Child’s Time
When we think about occupations, we think about jobs, like your career or the work you do every day to make money. But in the context of therapy, your occupation is anything that occupies your time.
What occupies a child’s time? Playing, learning, exploring, all of those things would occupy a child’s time. And your child’s job is to learn about their environment, learn new skills, learn how their body works, and things like that.
How Do Occupational Therapists Identify Challenges?
As occupational therapists (OTs), we do a lot of clinical observation. During this observation, we’re looking at the underlying skills that a child has, what they’re presenting with, and we go from there.
A good example is if you have a child that has a hard time sitting and doing tabletop activities. As OTs, we would be checking areas like:
- Are they getting their sensory needs met?
- Do they need something to fidget with, like a Pop-It?
- Do they have trouble seeing what’s on a paper when writing or reading?
- Do they have trouble seeing what’s on the classroom board?
- Is writing hard for them?
- Do they have good core strength to keep themselves upright?
- Is the activity or work boring for them?
OTs look at everything and we figure out, what are we having challenges with? What is the context in which we’re having challenges? Is it with the seating? Is it with our bodies? Is it with our vision? Is it with the level of light or noise in the room? We take all of those factors into account when we’re looking at a child’s needs.
What Areas of Development Can Occupational Therapy Address?
There are a bunch of areas of development that OTs can address, but I’ll talk briefly about motor skills, sensory processing, attention, and zones of regulation.
OT Addresses Motor Skills
OTs can help children build gross motor skills like running, jumping, and climbing. We can also help with fine motor skills, or skills that require the use of smaller muscle groups like the hands and fingers. For example bilateral coordination, which would be moving things from side to side, or dexterity, like taking a coin and being able to manipulate it with your fingers.
We also help children work on motor planning, which is essentially figuring out how to move to achieve a goal. For example, if you look at a rock-climbing wall, how would you get from the ground all the way up to the top, and how would you get back down? That’s a lot of motor planning.
OT Addresses Sensory Processing
Sensory processing is how the brain receives and interprets information it receives from the senses (e.g., touch, sight, smell, hearing, taste). We help kids be able to tolerate certain sensations a little bit better. We also recommend ways to help your child at home. For example, if your child can’t tolerate bathing because they don’t like the feel of it, we might recommend some modifications to make bath time less irritating for your child.
A lot of sensory challenges relate to interoception, which is how your body feels and knowing what your body is feeling. For example, when you get mad, you could feel yourself getting angry. Maybe your vision gets a little bit fuzzy. Maybe you clench your fist when you get angry. And a lot of what we do as OTs is just bringing awareness to what your body is feeling.
We also work on senses like proprioception, which is awareness of where your body is in space. Sometimes, you’ll see a kid that’s clumsy; but what’s happening is, they don’t really know where their body is in space. So, in order to figure it out, they bump into things. As OTs, we help them become able to figure out where their body is in space and move a little bit more safely.
OT Addresses Attention
Our basic hierarchy of needs is water, food, and shelter. I also like to categorize sensory underneath that. And getting all of these needs met helps with attention. A good example of this is if you can remember a time when you were really, really hungry and someone was trying to tell you something. They needed you to do something, but you were so hungry, all you could think about was being hungry. Were you really paying attention to what that person needed? Probably not.
But after you get that need met, after you eat something, you’re able to go back to that person and say, “Okay, what did you want me to do again?” And then you’re more able to pay attention and handle it. Once you get that sensory need met, it also helps with attention. Now you’re able to attend a lot better to what is being asked of you.
OT Addresses the Zones of Regulation
The Zones of Regulation is a tool that helps you identify how you’re feeling. We use these zones of regulation to help kids identify where they’re feeling and how to get them in the most optimal state. Each zone has its own color:
- The Blue Zone – when you’re feeling lower energy, kind of like sad, very tired, maybe sick.
- The Green Zone – where we typically want people to be, feeling happy, content, and ready to learn.
- The Yellow Zone – a little higher energy where you’re maybe a little bit silly, a little bit wiggly, maybe a little bit frustrated, maybe a little bit worried.
- The Red Zone – feeling out of control. You could be angry, frightened, scared, all those really big emotions.
We like to encourage everyone that it’s okay, whatever zone you’re in, that’s okay. We just need to go find a way to make us feel better to help us get to the green zone. If you’re feeling in the blue zone, that’s okay. If you’re feeling in the red zone, that’s fine too, but what can we do to make us feel better? That’s pretty much the whole point of the zones of regulation.
What Kinds of Activities Do Kids Do in Occupational Therapy?
Here at JLD, we’re very child-led and play-based. With play, children are able to learn so many different skills; and we see a lot of creativity in their approaches to play. When children gravitate towards a specific item or activity, it is very intrinsically motivating for them. We like to encourage that motivation and that creativity. And we can also build on that, too.
For example, let’s say a child has a challenging time grasping toys because they have decreased strength in their hands. When we see them gravitating towards the kitchen play set, we can do kitchen play and work on building strength in those hand muscles so they can improve their grasping skills. We can tear paper into smaller pieces and use those as sprinkles for our play cupcakes or a cake. We can also use play tongs to develop the hand muscles by picking up our toy food.
These activities are very fun, creative, and motivating for kids. And by letting children lead based on their interests and incorporating play into therapy, we can help them achieve incredible results.
Reach Out to JLD Therapy for an Evaluation
If you have any questions, or if your child is struggling with occupational skills, we’re here to help. Reach out to us at (408) 337-2727 to schedule an evaluation with a member of our therapy team today.