Occupational therapy (OT) focuses on helping people with physical, sensory and cognitive disability. It also helps to enhance a child’s ability to perform age appropriate activities such as playing, communicating with people, school performance and activities of daily living. It is also very helpful for children facing various handwriting problems by working upon the motor skills such as sloppy handwriting, difficulty correctly forming letters or trouble properly holding pencil. Occupational therapists asses intervene and remediate different physical, behavioral and intellectual difficulties and disabilities. An occupational therapist also focuses on improving a child’s

» Eye hand coordination (Hitting a target, batting a ball, copying from board etc)

» Teaching ADLS (Eating, bathing, getting dressed, toileting, transferring and continence

» Helps kids with behavioral disorders maintain positive behavior in all environment (eg instead of hitting others or acting out, living positive ways to deal with anger)

» Teach kids with physical disabilities the coordination skills to feed themselves, use a computer, on increase the speed and eligibility of their handwriting

» An occupational therapist also provides SENSORY INTEGRATION THERAPY which aims to help kids with sensory processing issues by exposing them to sensory stimulation in a structure repetitive way

MORE ABOUT OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY

Occupation refers to all the tasks or activities that a person:

Wants to do (interests, hobbies, play)

Has to do (e.g. eat, toilet, dress)

Is expected to do (reading, writing, academics)

Occupational Therapy aims to help a person achieve success in their life occupations. It focuses on the main occupations of:

School (e.g. writing, reading, fine motor skills, learning, attention)

Home tasks (e.g. fitting in with family life, jobs, homework, getting self-ready)

Play (e.g. imaginative play, social interaction, gross motor skills)

Self-care (e.g. bathing, dressing, eating, cutlery use, organizing self)

Work (preparing a person to be able to effectively engage in the workplace)

Areas Addressed

» Sensory Integration

» Autism

» Fine Motor Skills

» Gross Motor Skills

» Visual Perception

» Memory Issues

» Handwriting Difficulties

» School Readiness

» Play

» Eating issues

» Developmental Delays

» Self-care issues

» Toileting – encopresis/ enuresis/ delays

» Dressing

» Behavior management

» Most other functional difficulties

How Occupational Therapy Will Help

The therapist carefully analyses the sensory, physical, cognitive and behavioral aspects causing the child to have difficulties in his/her life occupations.Intervention is then targeted at the weak areas to improve the underlying skills. Intervention looks at a combination of:

Education of child and adult caregivers as to the reasons for the difficulties.Environmental modification where appropriate to help ensure that the child has the ―just right‖ level of challenges to enable success.

Remediation of the underlying skills through clinic treatment and/or home and school programming.