Occupational Therapy Pediatric occupational therapists are trained to improve the quality of children’s participation in their daily functional tasks. A child’s job is to play and take part in activities at school and at home. These include important endeavors such as paying attention in class, hand writing, dressing, feeding and grooming themselves, and being able to engage in age-appropriate games. Occupational therapists are also trained to help children organize and interpret information from the environment to further enhance playing and learning. This may include taste aversions that limit their food intake, or texture aversions that affect their clothing tolerance, or sound aversions that affect their mood.

Pediatric speech therapists treat communication challenges, both expressively (producing language) and receptively (understanding language), that cause children to have difficulty with verbal communication. Speech therapists also treat oral motor concerns, such as chewing and swallowing, as well as articulation, auditory processing and social skills. Disorders of speech are characterized by difficulty in producing speech sounds correctly, omitting or distorting sounds, or difficulty with producing a few sounds with no pattern. Language difficulties are seen when a child has difficulty understanding what they hear. They may struggle to find the right words to clearly convey their message in a way that has meaning and/or have difficulty holding a conversation with others.

In the pediatric outpatient setting, physical therapists are often musculoskeletal and movement specialists. With the advice of their doctors, parents can seek out evaluations when their babies are as young as 1 month old. Physical therapists have in-depth knowledge about human musculoskeletal, neuromuscular, and cardiovascular systems. Based on our background in stages of development and biomechanics, we help children with mobility difficulties; whether they are behind on their gross motor milestones, recovering from injury/surgery, or not keeping up with other children.

The term hippotherapy refers to how occupational therapy, physical therapy, and speech-language pathology professionals use the movement of a horse to engage sensory, neuromotor, and cognitive systems to achieve functional outcomes. We do Hippotherapy at a year round facility in conjunction with Simple Changes. The movement of a horse at a walk is the same as a human’s gait. This movement allows for intense facilitation within a child’s trunk and extremities to improve strength and function.

Aquatic Therapy Aquatic therapy is a specialized form of physical or occupational therapy. Water improves motion and flexibility. The natural buoyancy reduces gravitational pull and lessens compressive forces, hence making exercises much easier to perform than on land. Best of all, aquatic therapy can be used even if a patient does not know how to swim. Kids are able to do many things in the pool that they cannot or will not do on land. It is a super fun environment for kids to work on skills without them realizing how hard they are working!