Occupational Therapy
Occupational Therapy
Pediatric occupational therapy helps children gain independence with daily living skills while also strengthening the development of fine motor skills, sensory motor skills, and visual motor skills that children need to function and socialize. Fine motor skills are the small movements of our hands, fingers, and wrists that develop throughout our growing years. These include writing, cutting, keyboarding, eating, holding small items, buttoning, and turning pages. Proper development of fine motor skills requires strength, postural control, and coordination. It also requires appropriate function of our eyes.
Fine motor skills are very important to a child’s overall development, health, learning experiences, and self-esteem. Developing independence with fine motor skills at an early age is crucial to school performance, daily living skills, and self-care skills (such as dressing).
Occupational therapists work with children in the following areas:
- Improving fine motor skills so they can grasp and release toys and develop good handwriting skills.
- Addressing hand-eye coordination to improve kids’ play, academic, and social skills (hitting a target, batting a ball, copying from a blackboard, etc.)
- Learning daily living skills (such as bathing, getting dressed, brushing their teeth, and feeding themselves)
- Maintaining positive behaviors in all environments (e.g., instead of hitting others or acting out, using positive ways to deal with anger or socially acceptable replacement behaviors.)
- Evaluating the need for specialized equipment, such as wheelchairs, splints, bathing equipment, dressing devices, or communication aids.
- Improve brain functioning to help receive and respond to information that comes in Through the senses. Children with sensory processing disorder can be oversensitive to things in their environment such as common sounds, light, touch, taste, smells, etc. They may avoid or seek out sensory stimulation as a result.
- Improving attention and social skills to allow development of interpersonal relationships.
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