An occupational therapist can provide therapy and specialist equipment to help your child manage or improve specific difficulties. This can range from exercises to help with handwriting, through to teaching basic tasks such as teeth brushing to children with developmental delay. The aim is to maximise a child’s potential ability and increase independence.
Problems which an occupational therapist can help with include:
- Fine motor skills such as tying shoelaces, cutting and handwriting
- Hand-eye co-ordination, where children have problems with copying from a blackboard or ball games
- Daily living skills such as doing up buttons, using utensils, washing, eating and drinking
- Sensory integration, when children find it difficult to process message from the senses into motor responses and can result in clumsiness
- Spatial awareness and proprioception, knowing where your body and limbs are in space, and where objects are in relation to that, organising and interpreting sensory stimuli
- Visual discrimination – children with visual processing difficulty may not see the difference between a triangle and a square, or may mix up similar letters such as p and q. They have trouble reading maps or finding specific items on a page, colouring or writing within lines or margins, and identifying an object when parts of it are hidden