Occupational Therapy

Pediatric Occupational Therapy (OT)

Our Occupational Therapists utilize a variety of sensory, motor, and developmental strategies to help children improve performance in their daily life skills. Daily life skills are the skills needed for playing, school performance, and other daily activities such as dressing, eating, and other coordination tasks. Our therapists help children perform their daily activities that they may find challenging by addressing sensory, social, behavioral, and/or motor difficulties as well as environmental issues. 

We have therapists that specialize in treating children with feeding and swallowing difficulties which impact their ability to eat age appropriate food and diet by mouth (see Below).  We address gross and fine motor coordination and strength, social and emotional regulation skills, visual motor and processing function, and fine motor skills. We also address handwriting and self-care tasks, for example, dressing skills such as shoe tying and buttoning.

Our Occupational Therapists provide tailored treatment to each child while collaborating with primary caregivers for the carryover of new functional life skills. 

Feeding Therapy

We understand mealtime can be stressful when you have a child that won’t eat.  Whether it is sensory related, due to oral motor coordination, or medical conditions requiring a g-tube, ensuring your child’s nutritional needs are met is essential for his or her development.

Feeding therapy consists of evaluating oral motor skills as well as assessing areas related to feeding difficulties such as  “picky eating” behaviors including food jags, limited diets or textures, oral aversion, nutritional deficiencies, and poor weight gain.  We also have therapists who specialize in infant feeding and difficulty transitioning from breastfeeding to bottle/cup or difficulty transitioning from bottle to cup/straw. 

Our goal is to help reduce the anxiety related to mealtime for both our patients and their families, by helping mealtime become a fun, more pleasant experience for everyone. Our approach incorporates a sensory and oral motor based approach and interaction with food that is non-stressful where food is offered in a non-forced manner.