How Occupational Therapy Can Help Your Child Reach Important Milestones

The term occupational therapy is often misunderstood, thanks to our use of the term “Occupation” to describe a job. In reality, occupational therapy is an effective approach to helping people better integrate (or re-integrate) into the world around them by focusing on accomplishing everyday activities.

For 1 in 6 kids with at least one developmental disability or delay, occupational therapy can play an invaluable role in helping them to reach important milestones as they grow up.

At Celebrations Speech Group, the team of expert pediatric speech therapists and pathologists understands the importance of occupational therapy in helping kids to navigate the worlds around them.

To give you a better idea, we will take a deeper dive into what occupational therapy can do to help your child.

Basic goals of occupational therapy

When you have a child with a developmental disability, such as a speech disorder or autism spectrum disorder, the different kinds of therapy that we often suggest can be confusing. There’s speech, occupational, functional, and social skills therapy. Really, these are all designed to work together to help your child gain independence and confidence.

As a general description, occupational therapy (OT) is designed to help people with unique physical, social, and emotional needs meet everyday challenges.

For kids, this can mean:

• Social skills, such as learning to play in group settings
• Working on coordination and motor skills
• Improving communication 
• Managing certain behaviors, emotions, and sensory issues
• Implementing self-care

These are just examples, as each child’s occupational therapy is unique to their needs and goals.

This aspect of occupational therapy is important — we don’t fit your child into a pre-programmed therapy. Instead, we tailor their occupational therapy to their everyday needs, whether learning how to get up and get dressed in the morning or better integrating into a classroom.

Occupational therapy and developmental milestones

When we talk about developmental milestones, we’re referring to things like first steps, first words, etc. These milestones cover many different areas, including physical, language, cognitive, emotional, and social aspects of development. You can check out this comprehensive list from the CDC for a detailed look at developmental milestones.

As pediatric specialists, we understand that milestones aren’t carved in stone and that kids reach them at their own paces, and sometimes they won’t reach them at all.

For example, if your child has autism and doesn’t speak, we work through speech therapy and OT to help them communicate and function in their non-verbal world.

Whatever the challenges your child is facing, OT can help them meet important milestones that make their everyday lives a little easier.

If you’d like to learn more about how occupational therapy can help your child, we invite you to contact one of our offices in Brentwood, Stockton, or Elk Grove, California, to schedule an appointment.