What Is Occupational Therapy for Children?
For children with injuries, illnesses, or physical or developmental disabilities, occupational therapy, or OT, helps them learn skills and participate in everyday activities. Occupational therapy for children helps to improve many abilities, including visual and perception skills, cognition, processing the senses, and fine motor skills. This treatment focuses on children achieving independence, while enhancing self-esteem and sense of accomplishment.
Occupational therapists work with children who have a variety of conditions, including birth injuries or birth defects, sensory processing or integrative disorders, broken bones or other orthopedic injuries, and mental health or behavioral problems. The therapy works to improve normal development and performance, and allows children to regain function. Occupational therapy for children consists of customized treatment, recommendations, and training in the use assistive devices that help to replace lost function. Therapists also offer guidance to family members about safe and effective methods of caring for their child, and communicate with the child’s doctors and teachers to ensure appropriate treatment.
Occupational therapy for children helps them to develop life skills. The children practice writing, cutting, and other fine motor skills, as well as daily life skills, such as feeding and dressing themselves. When the strength and skills of a child cannot be improved, other alternatives are developed to allow the child to carry out his or her daily activities. Occupational therapists also evaluate a child's need for equipment such as hearing aids, bathing devices, and wheelchairs.
Since children’s main job is to play and to learn, occupational therapy for children often includes fun, educational activities. Occupational therapists use toys in working on fine motor skills so that children can practice grasping and releasing. Hand–eye coordination is also addressed, which can help children with activities such as throwing a ball at a target, hitting a ball with a bat, or copying words written on a blackboard.
For children with autism, OT is often sensory-based and helps them integrate their sensory systems within the environment. Therapy works on initiating and sustaining purposeful play and interacting with others. Occupational therapy for children with autism can involve swings, deep touch, massage, and several other techniques. For these students and others with behavioral disorders, occupational therapy for children can also address anger-management techniques. Therapy, for example, can help children learn to deal positively with anger, such as writing about feelings or participating in physical activities instead of acting out or hitting others.
Written by Stephanie Torreno
