Our Approach
Occupational therapy helps an individual achieve age-appropriate functioning and participation in their daily occupations: play, self-care, school or work activities, and social engagement. Occupational therapy evaluations assess a wide variety of skills that are an integral part of development and learning in order to better understand the factors contributing to difficulties in a child's everyday demands. We recognize that each child has different strengths and weaknesses. When those weaknesses start to interfere with how a child is functioning or participating, we want to explore why, and to discover specifically where the child needs support and intervention in order to provide experiences that help the child increase his or her ability, better equip the child for success, and build his/her confidence.
ABOUT OUR BRAIN-BASED APPROACH
Our occupational therapists approach each child's struggles with curiosity, partnering with parents to provide the best approach to facilitate change. Behavior is communication, telling us what skills still need to be developed. Because behavior has a purpose and is often a reflection of what is happening in the brain, mind, and body, we need to look at all facets to understand the meaning of the actions. From this lens, we see a person's actions as the beginning of understanding—a place to help us ask better questions about what is taking place in the environment, both relationally and internally, in order to start building skills and make lasting change from the inside out. When we care about kids, our purpose is to change more than behavior. We work at the level of creating new connections in the brain and nervous system in order to make lasting optimal change as development unfolds.
Our occupational therapists operate primarily from a sensory integration framework that recognizes sensory input from the environment drives our movements, responses, regulation, and social interaction. Through this framework the therapist structures meaningful and motivating sensorimotor activities in which the child engages in order to foster success, confidence, skill-building, and to widen the child’s window of tolerance, allowing them to be more resilient, flexible, and have greater ability to handle themselves and their emotions. Children with sensorimotor differences may experience: dyspraxia; dysgraphia; developmental delays; fine motor delays; overresponsivity to touch, sound, movement, or tastes; underresponsivity to touch, sound, movement, or tastes; visual-processing difficulties; and difficulty with transitions and emotional regulation.
““Independent living is not doing things by yourself. It is being in control of how things are done.””