Treatment

Play is essential to a child’s physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development.

A child’s interactions with people and his/her environment determine the skills which are practiced and mastered.

We use highly motivating play activities with various levels of structure to continuously provide the kinds of challenges each child needs to further development across all areas of function.

We employ a variety of frames of reference during treatment including:

Developmental - using materials and activities to engage the child while facilitating developmental skills.
Functional - increasing function by adapting activities or environments, or through assisting the child while he or she plays.
Sensory Integration - Therapists set up and manipulate the environment so the child can choose an activity that offers a "just right" challenge to promote developmental skills and self-competence.

Protocols/Models we incorporate into our treatment:

- DIR/Floortime

- Wilbarger Protocol

- Beckman Oral Motor

- NDT

- Handwriting Without Tears

- Therapeutic Listening

- Integrated Listening System (ILS)

- SOS Approach to sensory based feeding

- Neuro-Sensory-Motor and Reflex Integration (NMRI)

- Perceptual Enrichment Program (PEP)

- ALERT Program

- ZONES of Regulation

We address each child’s needs, separating functionality into three categories: motor development, self-care, and sensory integration.

For the motor development portion of our program we assess fine (hand) and gross (body) motor skills using standardized assessments. Treatment for motor skills focuses on creating strong foundations through posture and stabilization for higher level acquisition of more complex and coordinated skills and remediating gaps in the development process due to compensations that may have occurred along the way.

Self-care skills are assessed using parent interview and environmental demand. Skills we often work on include feeding, dressing, grooming, hygiene, and community safety. We address these skills both using therapeutic activities that work on individual skills that comprise each self-care process and practicing the skills themselves.

Our method for addressing sensory integration difficulties is a multiple step process:

First we analyze the problem areas. This includes a parent and related service interview to determine which skills each child is having difficulty with as well as behaviors that are of concern.

Then we observe the child’s reaction to environmental stimuli both natural and imposed. Using the information gained through interview we are able to focus on specific areas, but still test all systems to get a clear picture of current processing.

Once we have identified which system(s) is(are) affected , we create opportunities to re-learn processing by providing predictable sustained input then grading single sensory inputs to decrease predictability and challenge the ability to process.

After a single system has improved, we use play activities to challenge the system by introducing additional sensory inputs so that processing of multiple systems must occur simultaneously. The challenge keeps increasing until the processing issue has resolved. During the sensory learning process, we provide adaptations to increase independence by improving participation in daily tasks and aid the child and family in problem solving issues that arise.

We impact a child's ability to both modulate and self-regulate creating a more confident, centered, and functional individual. Our main focus is creating fully functional sensory systems and creating a way for each child to provide her/himself with compensation strategies to better understand how to meet her/his own sensory needs.

We provide home programming activities and environmental adaptations to improve overall functionality and quality of life for both child and caregiver.

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