How Occupational Therapy Can Help Your Child Reach Important Milestones

Raising a child can be the most rewarding and simultaneously the most challenging thing you’ll ever do in your lifetime. Each child develops and grows at a different pace, and they don’t come with instructions.

If you have more than one child, it’s not like you can cut and paste when all those firsts happen from the first child to the next. So, how can you tell if your child is developing at a healthy pace? And more importantly, what do you do if they don’t?

In this blog, the highly skilled therapists at High Quality Home Therapy discuss developmental milestones and how occupational therapy can help your child reach all those essential benchmarks.

Developmental milestones explained

Let’s dive in by first explaining what developmental milestones are. The easiest way to define milestones is to think about all those firsts that parents/guardians and grandparents dote on – a baby’s first words, the first time they roll over, crawl, take their first steps, etc.

Developmental milestones are benchmarks for physical skills or social behaviors that typically occur within a specific age range. Keep in mind that just because your child isn’t mastering a skill or behavior during the defined age range, it doesn’t mean that your child has a developmental issue.  

Be both patient and vigilant about reaching developmental milestones. Look for these common signs that there may be an issue brewing:

• Difficulties mastering tasks that require motor skills, such as dressing, tying their shoes, or having problems with balance or walking up and down steps
• Problems holding or gripping objects like toys, cups, or crayons
• Being over- or under-stimulated by certain sounds, smells, or texture.
• Avoiding eye contact with others or being socially withdrawn

Schedule a comprehensive evaluation

If you consistently notice one or more of these signs, a good first step to discovering if your child needs help is to schedule an initial evaluation. Here at High Quality Home Therapy, our compassionate and highly trained staff meet with you and your child.

During this appointment, you are in the same room as your child and the therapist. The therapist reviews your child’s and family’s medical history and, depending on the symptoms you’ve observed, they ask your child to perform some tasks.

Through the task portion of the evaluation, your therapist gleans information about your child’s motor skills and visual and sensory reactions to stimuli. Using this data, your therapist gains insight into potential barriers that may hinder meeting milestones. The evaluation is also a beneficial tool to determine if your child is a good candidate for occupational therapy.

When your provider deems occupational therapy a good fit for your child’s needs, they use information from the evaluation to create a personalized therapy plan that enhances your child’s daily living skills.

Occupational therapy to enhance and master skills

While other therapy modalities, such as physical therapy, focus on mastering physical skills due to an impairment or injury, occupational therapy is focused on the individual, their activities, and their environment to enhance and master daily living skills.

While some barriers to developmental milestones may be physical or cognitive, similar to those addressed by physical therapy, occupational therapy also addresses psychological barriers such as depression, anxiety, and social interaction challenges.

High Quality Home Therapy offers patients occupational therapy in our office, at patients’ homes, and through telehealth. An occupational therapy treatment plan includes things like activities, such as:

• Grabbing and releasing an object to enhance fine motor skills
• Practicing social scenarios introducing coping to address social interaction issues; or 
• Hitting a ball to improve hand-eye coordination

Besides in-session activities and similar to physical therapy, patients are often given “homework” between sessions. The duration of an occupational therapy treatment plan varies from patient to patient, depending on the issues and goals addressed.

If you have concerns about your child’s developmental milestones and want to know more about occupational therapy, contact High Quality Home Therapy in Stamford, Connecticut. Use our online booking feature or call us today to schedule an evaluation.