Occupational Therapy

What is Occupational Therapy?

Occupational therapy is the only profession that helps people across the lifespan to do the things they want and need to do through the therapeutic use of daily activities (occupations). Occupational therapy practitioners enable people of all ages to live life to its fullest by helping them promote health, and prevent—or live better with—injury, illness, or disability.

Common occupational therapy interventions include helping children with disabilities to participate fully in school and social situations, helping people recovering from injury to regain skills, and providing supports for older adults experiencing physical and cognitive changes.

Occupational therapy services typically include:

An individualized evaluation, during which the client/family and occupational therapist determine the person’s goals
Customized intervention to improve the person’s ability to perform daily activities and reach the goals
An outcomes evaluation to ensure that the goals are being met and/or make changes to the intervention plan.

At what age might a child benefit from occupational therapy?

This is child dependent. We see children as young as newborn age for feeding and motor issues. Many of our clients that are two and under, come to us because of difficulties with play skills and babbling/talking. We encourage you to seek early intervention to get an early started on talking and learning.

How do I know if my child could benefit from occupational therapy?

Check out the free quiz below to discover if your child may be a good candidate for occupational therapy.

Take the Quiz

How can my child benefit from Occupational Therapy?

Occupational therapy covers a wide variety of skills and abilities that impact children's development and participation in their every day life. You can check out more information about these various skills and abilities that are addressed by clicking on each section below.

Sensory integration therapy aims to help those with sensory discrimination and sensory modulation challenges or poor integration of sensation. This results from difficulties in how the nervous system receives, organizes and uses sensory information from the body and the physical environment for self-regulation, motor planning, and skill development. Difficulty integrating sensory systems impact our ability to perform self-care tasks, achieve emotional regulation, attention, problem-solving, behavior control, skill performance, social skills.

Strengthen skills necessary for daily living such as play, dressing, tying shoes, toileting, bathing, and feeding.

Emotional regulation is the ability to self-calm during emotional and stressful situations. Children with emotional regulation issues often tantrum more frequently and for a longer time than their peers and become easily upset without a clear cause. Occupational therapy helps assist by teaching self-calming abilities by working on sensory-based issues underlying emotional dysregulation, and providing parents with strategies to handle and prevent excessive emotional outbursts.

Helping children reach developmental milestones and develop foundational motor movement patterns for successful participation in more complex motor tasks and age-appropriate play.

Occupational therapists use their creativity to turn everyday objects into new games or toys to encourage engagement and motivation, and make learning everyday tasks fun.

A variety of eye movements that help us fixate on a target, track slow moving objects, and sudden quick change in our gaze from one object/target to another.

Visual-Motor integration is the ability to use both our hands and eyes for a variety of tasks such as drawing, writing, coloring, matching, copying, throwing and catching a ball.

There are several different types of attention, and all can impact a child’s ability to successfully participate in their daily routines.

Executive functioning skills are a combination of skills that help a person plan, organize, set goals, initiate, transition between tasks, self-monitor, shift mindsets, connect information, set priorities, perceive information. These skills are necessary to navigate our day-to-day habits and routines based on the many roles that we each carry (i.e., student, sibling, friend, etc.) Occupational therapists are trained to adapt the environment using a variety of resources/strategies to help children and youth develop executive functioning skills.

Occupational Therapy

What is Occupational Therapy?