The Best Occupational Therapy Service @ The Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne (Box Hill, Balwyn, Blackburn, Nunawading, and surrounding suburbs)

We provide outreach services for children from 0-9 years of age, focusing on their Early Childhood Early Intervention

What is Occupational Therapy?

Occupational Therapy enables people to engage in their activities of daily living to their optimal potential. They aim to enhance the compatibility between a person’s skills, environment, and meaningful activities to improve their performance in these activities.

A child engages daily in a variety of activities that require essential skills to complete them. These skills include fine motor skills, eye-hand coordination, visual perception, motor coordination, and others.  Occupational Therapists can recognize a child’s/family’s area of concern and work collaboratively as a team toward meeting appropriate developmental milestones.

Why do we need an OT and when should I refer my child?

In pediatric occupational therapy, we aim to allow our babies and children to develop their independence in everyday tasks such as:

  • Fine motor skills: Coordinating the small muscles such as the hand (usually in coordination with the eyes), to enable your child to hold, explore, and manipulate toys and tools such as a pencil or spoon. Fine motor skills are used in activities such as handwriting, dressing, feeding, and using scissors.
  • Gross motor skills: Involve the large muscles of the body that are important for major body movement such as sitting, walking, jumping, and throwing a ball.
  • Tool use: Involves utilizing objects within the hand such as cutlery or pencils for play, self-care and handwriting skills.
  • Handwriting: A child must have sufficient manual dexterity, fine motor coordination, and visual motor skills for handwriting. Areas such as letter formation, reversals, speed, legibility, pencil grip, and reducing pain and/or fatigue may be addressed.
  • Tabletop and School Readiness: These activities are generally the expected requirements when starting kindergarten. For example; drawing, cutting with scissors, on-task classroom behavior, task completion, following instructions, and craft skills.
  • Self-care skills: Involve skills such as using a knife and fork, tying shoelaces, fastening buttons, and dressing and toileting.
  • Play skills: These are those that are used in everyday play, such as threading and using puzzles as well as the imaginative, social, and communication requirements.
  • Visual perception: Involves understanding what is being seen. Visual perception is highly important in completing many activities, such as reading a story, completing a puzzle, identifying letters and numbers, copying, and writing.
  • Sensory processing: Involves the way the body processes and reacts to the information it receives from the surrounding environment. Children may demonstrate over or under-sensitivity to certain sensations such as loud noises or certain items of clothing; sensation-seeking behavior, such as chewing on things or enjoying being spun repetitively; and difficulty maintaining a calm state.
  • Emotional Regulation: Learning to regulate emotions, though, is a complex process. Emotion regulation calls on so many skills, including attention, planning, cognitive development, and language development. Children develop those skills at different times. Their ability to manage negative feelings depends on genetics, their natural temperament, the environment they grow up in, and outside factors like how tired or hungry they are. But parents, teachers, and other caregivers all play a critical role in helping children learn to manage their feelings. We focus on capacity building to enable parents and caregivers to assist with emotional regulation.

What we can help with?

Autism spectrum disorders and related disorders

https://www.autismspectrum.org.au/content/what-autism

Developmental delays

http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/devdel.htm

Sensory processing disorders

https://childdevelopment.com.au/areas-of-concern/diagnoses/sensory-processing-disorder-spd/

Gross motor delays

https://childdevelopment.com.au/resources/child-development-charts/gross-motor-developmental-chart/

Fine motor delays

https://childdevelopment.com.au/resources/child-development-charts/fine-motor-developmental-chart/

Dyspraxia / motor planning difficulties

https://occupationaltherapychildren.com.au/we-have-skills/my-childs-condition/dyspraxia-developmental-coordination-disorder-dcd/

  • School and kindergarten visits
  • Preparation for transition to school
  • Parent education and information on a range of developmental issues
  • Play development
  • Handwriting difficulties