Occupational Therapy

Occupational therapy (OT) helps children improve their cognitive, physical, sensory, and motor skills so they can succeed at the tasks that are essential to everyday life, like eating, playing, and getting dressed. 

The ProActive Difference

Our occupational therapist, Lisa Dolphin, focuses on treating the child as a whole. Most OTs will focus on table work to improve rote skills of handwriting, cutting with scissors, tracing mazes, or the like. However, Lisa treats by identifying the underlying neurological causes of these symptoms or problem areas. In other words, she gets to the root cause of the problem and addresses it.

Often, Lisa’s occupational therapy work may look similar to physical therapy. Like a PT, she’ll address gross motor coordination, balance work, eye-hand coordination, and integration of primary reflexes. This is because of her focus on identifying the underlying brain stem issues. Once these improve, then the refined movements, coordination of the hands, eyes, tongue will develop.

Can Occupational Therapy (OT) help my child?

Children who could benefit from our OT services may display some of the following:

Dislikes being held or cuddled

Dislikes being on tummy

Has not reached developmental milestones

Has stiff or loose arms

Has non-fluid arm movements 

Has weak arms/hands

Difficulty performing tasks with both hands

Difficulty cutting with scissors

Has poor handwriting

Is over- or under-reactive to touch, movement, sights, sounds, taste or textures 

Dislikes wearing certain clothing

Difficulty using eyes and hands together

Difficulty dressing/tying shoes

Difficulty buttoning, snapping, or zipping 

Has trouble performing self-care tasks

Erratic arousal/alertness 

Has poor attention to task

Occupational Therapy builds the following skills

Feeding Skills

Addressing feeding issues proactively helps support your child’s growth and overall development. We have extensive knowledge and skills in evaluating and treating infants and children who need help with feeding. This can include helping infants who are having difficulties drinking from a bottle, gaining weight, or transitioning to puree or solid foods. 

We also help infants and children who use a gastrostomy or naso-gastric tube for additional nutritional support transition to oral feedings. Some children are picky eaters and are not able or willing to eat a wide variety of healthy foods. Through evaluation, treatment, and collaboration with families, we help infants and children grow and enjoy eating.

Breastfeeding

Lisa is a Certified Lactation Counselor (CLC). The combination of being a CLC and her extensive knowledge and skills in infant feeding and development helps her to support moms and babies with successful breastfeeding. Learn more here.

Fine Motor Skills

Lisa is trained to evaluate children’s fine motor skills (basically anything you do with your hands!) and can provide interventions to target delays and deficits in this area. Think of the hundreds of tasks kids use their hands for each day: grasping and controlling a crayon for coloring, reaching for and using a spoon for feeding, turning the pages of a book, using both hands together to hook and pull up the zipper on a coat. Imagine how frustrating it is for kids who are not to be able to do these things for themselves.

Visual Motor Skills And Visual Perceptual Skills

Our occupational therapist also works with children on visual-motor integration, or hand-eye coordination, so that they can successfully use and interact with the tools and objects in their environments. Strong visual motor skills are essential for tasks like reaching for an object, handwriting, drawing, cutting with scissors, and dressing yourself.  

We also address visual-perceptual skills, ensuring that children can make sense of what they see in the world around them. Visual perception is what lets us understand space, position, and orientation. It’s how we remember what we see and recognize similarities and differences between objects. Examples may include learning letters of the alphabet, recognizing numbers, and sequencing the letters of your name.

Sensory Processing

Our occupational therapist helps children learn to understand, process, and organize sensations in their environments and respond in appropriate ways to everyday situations. These sensations may include sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and movement. 

Children with sensory processing issues may have inappropriate or disruptive behaviors, poor attention, have frequent meltdowns, poor sleep patterns (inability to fall asleep on their own or restless sleep), tendency to be clumsy, or difficulty learning new skills.

For example, when most children feel crumbs on their faces, they wipe them away without much thought. Or, if they hear a fire alarm at school, their reaction would be to line up with the others at the door to exit the building. However, children with sensory processing problems are unable to understand these sensations and their reactions to them are often negative, protective, or fearful. These children benefit from OT services to help them learn to integrate these sensations, help them make sense of all the incoming sensory inputs within their environments and, as a result, have improved motor skills, self-regulation skills, and interactions in their everyday lives. 

Self Care Skills

Our occupational therapist can teach children how to take care of themselves more independently. For example, she may work on dressing, bathing, toileting, and self-feeding skills such as holding a bottle, drinking from a cup or using utensils. 

What is important for independence in one family or classroom can be quite different from another, so we always adapt to the needs of each individual child and family situation. Self care needs are continuously changing as children get older and expectations for independence grow.