The birth of a newborn is always a great delight, and watching the baby grow and easily reach milestones is an even greater joy for the parents. However, when a baby’s growth and development seem to slow down or altered at any point, it could be a great source of worry and disturbance to the parents.
Because of this, this can cause major physical, emotional, and social disorder for children. It could lead to a lack of basic social skills, like self-esteem problems, autism, etc. This is why every child struggling with any form of developmental challenge needs a child’s occupational therapist.
This article looks at who’s a child occupational therapist and how they help children.
What is Child Occupational Therapy?
A child occupational therapy, otherwise known as OT, is a form of care a child receives to help improve any form of developmental challenges the child may be facing. Such developmental challenges could start and be noticed from infancy. It could be feeding problems, deficiency in basic motor skills, self-regulation challenges, like cerebral palsy, genetic disorders, such as down syndrome, cleft palate, etc.
A child occupational therapist is the professional trained to administer the therapeutical sections to correct and treat these developmental challenges in children. If you’ve noticed your child needs an occupational therapist, you can find an excellent child occupational therapist at https://www.connectionstherapies.com/children/occupational-therapy/.
What Does A Child Occupational Therapist Help With?
A child’s occupational therapist is trained and equipped to help children with congenital disabilities, learning disabilities, neuromuscular disorders, sensory and self-regulation challenges, oral and feeding delays, and any other form of developmental difficulties the children may be facing.
Each of these will be analyzed in subsequent paragraphs with details on how a child’s occupational therapist can help with each problem.
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Birth Defects
Birth defects usually occur when a baby is born with either a malfunctioning body part or organs. While doctors haven’t been able to explain the cause of congenital disabilities categorically, they have been able to categorize the causes of environmentally caused congenital disabilities and genetically caused congenital disabilities.
An example of a genetically caused birth disability is Down syndrome. Down syndrome changes and slows the development of a baby, which can lead to major cognitive delays. A child occupational therapist is needed to help children living with down syndrome to master certain skills that’ll help them live well. Such skills are needed to reduce their dependence on people and increase their activities at home, school, or during their leisure times.
If your baby has down syndrome, you’ll need an occupational therapist to help your child with some feeding therapies. These therapies are needed to strengthen the muscles necessary for your baby to feed well.
Continuous therapies will assist the baby not only to feed well but also to be able to independently self-feed themself. As the baby grows, the occupational therapist can focus on increasing the child’s independence by focusing the therapies on assisting the legs, visions, and hearing abilities
An occupational therapist can also help the child by teaching some basic skills to take care of themselves without involving a third party. These skills could include how to comb one’s hair, lace shoes, wear clothes, among others.
An occupational therapist should be contacted and involved once a diagnosis is done. It helps the child to live a healthier and more balanced life, and also increase the child’s self-esteem.
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Learning Disabilities
Learning disability happens when a child finds it difficult to know things that they’re already expected to know. Learning disability has nothing to do with the intelligence of the child. This means an intelligent child could still have some form of learning disability.
It could affect how the child read, listens, or solves problems. While this challenge is not limited to the classroom, it’s usually noticed in the classroom where the child is expected to demonstrate a level of learning skills.
A child that has learning disabilities finds it difficult to learn easily or quickly needs an occupational therapist. The occupational therapist will organize routines that’ll stimulate the child’s thinking pattern and help them recognize patterns.
The therapist will also work with the classroom conditions of the child, as the positioning of desks and chairs. Another way the therapist could help is by simplifying information to small bits. The combination of these will help the child learn more easily, and significant improvements can be observed after some time.
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Sensory And Self-Regulation Challenges
Occupational therapists can help children that face self-regulation and sensory challenges by going through therapies and programs that focus on their cognitive behaviors.
This type of program will help the child define their alert mode every time. The alert mode can be high, normal, or low. With programs aimed at teaching your child how to stabilize their high alert mode or increase low alert mode, they’ll learn how to self-regulate and will be able to increase the rate at which they can focus on things.
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Neuromuscular Disorders
Children living with neuromuscular disorders are mostly in pain already, and anything done to reduce the pain is welcomed. This is why, as a parent, you need to know when your child needs an occupational therapist and introduce them as soon as possible.
An occupational therapist will monitor such a child to prevent complications, help the child to maximize their health capacities, and also help the child to have easy integration into the community. This will significantly improve the child’s esteem and life.
The occupational therapist may employ the use of different strategies, such as engaging in regular physical exercises for better health and to encourage mobility, such as stretching. In addition to this, there could also be a provision for a special seating system that’ll not only help any form of back or spinal challenge but also provide comfort.
Conclusion
Your child may be experiencing any of the developmental challenges mentioned above, or it could even be something else entirely. As long as it’s a developmental problem, you need to employ the services of an occupational therapist immediately.
Some developmental challenges are minor, and some are very serious and could, in fact, be life-threatening. Whatever the challenge may be, your child doesn’t deserve to continue living in pain.
An occupational therapist will encourage the motor skills of your child, help with learning disabilities, promote self-esteem, and help them be part of a community to live a good and healthy life.
