The Occuplaytional Therapist 
When you start to understand how thin — or nonexistent! — the dividing line is between “playing” and “learning/growing”, suddenly so much more of what children do makes sense. And suddenly so much more of when adults do/don’t choose to correct them about it seems…totally nonsensical or arbitrary, from a child’s point of view. My … Read more
Hey! This post is going to be about Jesus, and child development, and the kind of Christianity I grew up in, that I’ve moved away from, and where I see myself now. I recognize that there is a lot of hurt and tenderness in this topic for many people, as well as you maybe just … Read more
I have a child on my caseload who is Autistic and a “gestalt language learner” — a descriptive term for children who learn to speak in phrases or scripts (as opposed to learning to speak one word at a time). There’s many categories of gestalt language learning, and this isn’t meant to be a whole … Read more
My kids have been watching Inside Out recently. It’s a movie that takes place largely inside the characters’ minds from the point of views of their personified emotions. Everybody has the emotions Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. If you haven’t seen it in a few years, it really holds up amazingly — there is … Read more
Imagine three scenarios. You’re holding your child on your lap. Your child is sobbing and screaming at the top of their lungs, curled up against you. In one scenario, they have just tripped, fallen, and banged their head on the floor. In a second scenario, their block tower has just fallen over. In a third, … Read more
A small thought (from my time in studying for my UK driver’s license)… I got this practice question on a practice test and it made me pause. Can you read it and think of why? Do you see how it automatically assumes that the person reading this must not be a disabled driver? But in … Read more
Another play invitation set-up from a recent weekend… Okay, so this is a little “extra” as far as I usually go with setting up play for my kids, but I was intrigued by the idea. You add a drop of food coloring to milk, toast some white bread, set out some paintbrushes, and let the … Read more
I see children on my school OT caseload who are three, and four, and five, and six. They are behaving in all sorts of inconvenient ways for traditional schooling. They touch things when they pass by them in the hallways. They stand up from chairs and move around the room, or they fall out of … Read more
Kids need room to play, unimpeded and unhelped, on materials that are at their level and above their level and below their level of ability to climb and interact with. They interact with things at their level and below their level to explore mastery. Their body learns what it has already learned, and reinforces and … Read more
I was talking with another OT recently about our experiences when we were newly graduated and working at our first jobs. She shared a story with me about the first school she worked at. She found the former OT’s list of “Rules for OT” in the therapy room…which basically amounted to a personalized list of … Read more