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Occupational Therapy For Kids at our Child Development Center

Occupational therapy

At HOPE CDC, our experts, being well trained in Sensory Integration (SI) to evaluate and address children’s sensory processing disorders. Occupational therapy works in close collaboration with the child in a warm and entertaining environment to help remove the obstacles which challenge the process of learning, enabling them to calm down and better tackle everyday chores which would have not been possible without it, due to their sensory processing disorder.

Based on an individual’s activity levels, low or high of the child, Sensory integration therapy is designed with the main focus being to ameliorate the ability of the brain to understand and process sensory information for the child to go on with their daily routines/activities.

Most people may consider occupational therapy to be only for adults; because kids do not hold any occupations. But as we see it, the child’s main job is to learn & tackle life, and occupational therapists can evaluate kids based on performance and daily activities, in turn comparing them with what is considered to be developmentally appropriate based on the age group.

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Why would a child with autism need to see an occupational therapist?

In the case of autism, Occupational Therapists (OT’s) have vastly expanded the usual breadth of their job. In the past, for example, an occupational therapist might have worked with an autistic person to develop skills for handwriting, shirt buttoning, shoe tying, and so forth.

But today’s occupational therapists specializing in autism may also be experts in sensory integration (difficulty with processing information through the senses) or may work with their clients on play skills, social skills and more.

What Does an Occupational Therapist Do for Kids with Autism?

Since kids with autism often lack some of the basic social and personal skills which are required for independent living, Occupational Therapists have developed techniques for working on these needs. For example:

Provide interventions to help a child appropriately respond to information coming through the senses. Intervention may include swinging, brushing, playing in a ball pit and a whole gamut of other activities aimed at helping a child to manage his body in space.
Facilitate play activities that instruct as well as aid a child in interacting and communicating with others. For a specialized Occupational Therapist, this can be specifically structured into play therapy; such as Floor time, which is developed to build intellectual and emotional skills as well as physical skills.
Devise strategies to help the individual transition from one setting to another, from one person to another, and from one life phase to another. For a child with autism, this may involve soothing strategies for managing transition from home to school; for adults with autism it may involve vocational skills, cooking skills and more.