Archive for: children

Archive for children

Table Top Sensory!

By zfortadmin
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022

OT (Occupational Therapy)/Sensory based table top activities for school-aged children

Play is an important aspect to a child’s growth and development. It is a child’s primary occupation to play. The occupations of a person are the meaningful and purposeful activities we participate in during the day. Adults have different occupations than children, but sometimes it is important for everyone to play! A child develops functional skills, motor skills, language skills and interpersonal skills through play. Engaging in different types of activities at home can even help your child develop skills in the classroom. Play helps encourage all areas of development, from cognitive and physical to social and emotional. Some benefits of play are it builds self-esteem and confidence, develops problem-solving skills, encourages new vocabulary usage, teaches children to be alone and independent, allows children to release their emotions and encourages planning and thinking ahead. It can be a great tool for children to connect with their peers and the adults around them. Fine motor development is important for children to develop as well as gross motor development. At a preschool age children are working on both. Gross motor (large muscle groups) development can impact fine motor (small muscle groups). As a child builds stability in their core it allows more control in the hands etc. Since play can be filled with opportunities for development, here are some activities children can play at a table while encouraging fine motor growth and development.

Tape play

Picking at the edges of the tape is a fun way for little hands to develop fine motor dexterity. They are working on a pincer grasp (tip-to-tip pinch of the thumb and index finger)
Playing a word spelling game with boxes made out of tape. Have the child help tear the tape into bits (tripod grasp, working on small motor strength of the hand arches)

Tweezers play

Pick up large or small objects with tweezers. Put things in sand, rice or beans and have children try to tweeze them out. (Tripod grasp, working on separating the two sides of the hand in a small motor task)
Sort pom –poms by color or size with tweezers into cupcake tins, bowls or empty egg cartons. Have the child tweeze a pom- pom from one side of the body to the other. (Tripod grasp, working on crossing mid-line.)

Play dough play

Press thick beads into play dough with the thumb in a bent position. This helps encourage development of an appropriate pencil grasp. (Working on the muscles needed to oppose with an open web space and flex the tip of the thumb.
Using play dough mats or the surface of a table play utilize play dough by pushing, smashing, rolling, and pulling it apart. Make sure the whole arm is involved in manipulating the dough! (Working on finger, shoulder and arm strength that helps support an age appropriate writing grasp.)

Pipe cleaner play

After tying a knot at one end, have the child hold the pipe cleaner with one hand and bead with the other. Using beads with smaller openings will require the child to use more finger strength. Make patterns with colors or shapes for more fun! (Working tip-to-tip pinch of the thumb, index finger and eye/hand coordination. )
Place an upside down colander on the table. Use various sized pipe cleaners to poke through the holes. Make designs and patterns using different colors. Try to get the same pipe cleaner in more than one hole. Add a time challenge for older children to see how many they can place in 30 seconds. (Working on pincer grasp, eye/hand coordination, bilateral coordination and sequencing.)

Water play

Sort water beads by color or size using a spoon or measuring cup. Place water beads in a bin or a sink and have the child scoop and sort into cups or buckets.
Filling up a container with water, have the child use a turkey baster or plastic pipettes to squeeze water in and out.. Add food coloring, sparkles or bath toys for more sensory play. For younger children, use a sponge he or she can squeeze out after dipping it into the water bin. (Tripod grasp, working on pinching and fine motor strength/ coordination.)

Categories : Advice, Parenting, Sensory Processing
Tags : , ,

The Great Sasco River of Darien

By zfortadmin
Friday, October 21st, 2022

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,”

Sir Winston Churchill

_____

We officially announce the opening of our newest clinic, SRC Darien.

Sasco River Center was formed in January 2020, out of the realization that treating a whole person leads to better results than focusing on one narrow area.  While prior to that, respectively Southfield Center and Sensory Kids were both leaders in their fields, after sharing cases across our practices and then opening a shared location in Wilton, we merged to create Sasco River Center with the goal of becoming our area’s best multidisciplinary family development center.  

One important element of this goal is our clinic locations.  We realized after the experiment in Wilton that it was possible to interweave spaces for the services that we offer, and in the process, make the sum more than the parts.  We found a bucolic location at Darien Crossing, a revitalized office park campus in the heart of Darien.  After an intensely collaborative design process involving architects, contractors, landlord, gym designers, structural engineers, and too many other consultants to name, we developed a plan which has brought the concept of Sasco River Center to life.

Please take a peek at the virtual tour below.

Warm regards,

Chris & Melissa

picture of Chris and Melissa
Dr. Christopher Bogart & Melissa Kahn, MS OTR/L
Co-executive Directors

A Tour Down the Sasco River

At the heart of our clinic is one large, common hallway which runs through the clinic, metaphorically the Sasco River, which ties all of our services together.  

office layout design

We’ll start our tour at the quiet end of the river.  Here we find the subdued testing/psych offices, with their brightly colored doorways and calming floors.  Transoms of translucent glass flood the hallway with light filtered through the offices.

photo of the hallway in the office

The offices themselves are warm, comfortable and inviting.

inside of meeting room
inside of another meeting room

From there the river flows past the entry doors and into the dynamic waiting room.  On the wall is a butterfly, which symbolizes our capacity for regrowth.

.waiting room

We will tiptoe past the admin offices and then we’re greeted by the eddy swirl that is the fine motor desk and the shores of the tactile room’s rock wall beyond.

rock wall for kids
another angle of rock wall

Note the secret access to the lyca room up in the corner!

Moving down the river a litte, we see a sneak peak of the Large OT area through the porthole 

storage area

And then to the Large OT Gym  itself.  

play area for kids

The Large OT Gym has its own rock wall, zip lines, platforms and swings, all surrounding the custom swing mount system.

two kids playing
young boy playing

Did we mention the large lite-brite?

child playing with doctor

Next on our tour is the Medium OT Gym.  This gym can be accessed by heading over the up-and-over wall from the Large OT Gym, and landing in a foam pit.  

young boy climbing ladder

Other fun aspects of this gym are the trampoline, slide, cozy cave, and a specially imported system which can convert to a ropes course, large trampoline, or inclined ladder. 

three boys playing

However, the highlight of this area may be the large blue tunnel which crosses over the river/hall and drops us off in the Lycra Room.

kids play room

The Lycra room is a cozy spot where we can cover ourselves with some of the many layers of stretchy goodness as we make our way to the padded floor.

young boy playing
play area for kids

At the other end of the river are more therapeutic offices, a long lunch counter for our team to congregate.

picture of the hallway

We hope you enjoyed our tour, and can come and see us in person one day soon!

You can see the whole gallery of clinic images HERE.

SEE ALL OF OUR LOCATIONS
Categories : News
Tags : ,

Letting Your Kids Work It Out On Their Own

By zfortadmin
Wednesday, September 14th, 2022

We want our kids to succeed, plain and simple. We want to see them thrive, accomplish things, feel good about themselves, and reach their potential. For some parents, though, the pathway to mastery can be pretty painful. So if you ache to watch your child trying to learn a new skill, if you feel an impulse to jump in and rescue them from a challenge, or if you have an even harder time than your child does coping when they miss the mark, this article is for you!

First off, your compassion for your child is beautiful. The fact that you feel so deeply for them is a visceral sign of how deeply you love them, how connected you feel to them, and how far your empathy travels. However, if your level of discomfort exceeds theirs when watching them tackling a difficult challenge, it might get in the way of their ability to master a skill.

Following are some tips to help you navigate moments when your child is facing a challenge. These are ways to help you balance how much to help versus how much to lay off. In addition, how to resist that pesky impulse to intervene at the wrong moment!

When to Step In

mom helping daughter with work

 It is healthy for children to confront some challenges. Facing novel tasks head-on encourages them to develop their problem-solving skills, build grit and resilience, use creativity, work on self-regulation, and cultivate independence. But when the challenge is too steep, it can be discouraging and promote feelings of inadequacy.

When you’re trying to figure out whether to step in, first consider your child’s developmental level. Think about what skills they already have, and take a beat to determine whether you have good reason to believe they can apply those skills to the current situation. If the task seems entirely beyond their reach, consider the least possible intervention to make the task possible. A little bit of frustration on their end is okay – in fact, it can even be motivating – so long as the frustration doesn’t rise so much that they can’t cope with it. The goal here is to scaffold them towards mastery of a new skill. The sweet spot is when they have to work a little harder and use a little ingenuity to figure it out.

Wait It Out

man looking at laptop

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a task is at the right level for a kid to take on independently. If you’re concerned that you might intervene too soon and get in the way of their progress, hit pause. See if you can hold off for 5 minutes before stepping in. This will give you and them some time to see if they can figure it out independently.

But how do you fight that all-consuming urge to step in??

Find Your Mantra

doubt with ubt crossed out

Come up with a short and snappy phrase you can repeat to yourself in the moment to remind yourself why you’re stepping back. He can do this. This is how she’ll learn. My anxiety doesn’t need to be his anxiety. Find the thought that fits for you and say it in your mind as much as necessary. If you need something even more substantial, you can write the thought down on an index card that you keep in your wallet as a visual reminder.

Observe Your Feelings Like Clouds

grass and clouds

Feelings don’t last forever. If you wait long enough, each feeling will pass, and new feelings come along. If your distress level is high and makes you want to “rescue” your child (when your child is doing okay on their own…), label your feeling. Do you feel scared? Anxious? Uncomfortable? Find the word that fits your emotional state, and imagine that word plastered across a cloud overhead. Observe the cloud floating in, covering you in its shade, then moving along until it’s out of sight. This practice not only grounds you in the moment and makes you feel more in control of your emotions, but it also serves as a distraction to help you wait it out!

If All Else Fails, Step Away

man walking on pier

If the urge to intervene is too strong, and you know it could cause negative repercussions (like embarrassing your child in front of his friends, perhaps!), separate yourself. Pace out of sight, turn your head away from the situation, distract yourself by talking to someone else, or even scroll through your phone. Bonus: taking the time to help yourself cool down when your emotions get the best of you is excellent modeling for your children to learn how to cool down when their emotions get the best of them!

Remember, we all need to stumble to learn how to get back up again. It’s okay to let your kids work some challenges out on their own, so long as they have the skillset and self-confidence to do so. The more opportunities they have, even if they don’t end successfully, the more they’ll grow!

Categories : Advice, Parenting
Tags : , , , ,

How to Play

By zfortadmin
Friday, July 15th, 2022
Come on, let’s play! (Photo by Skitterphoto)

How to Play
(With Your Child)

A lot of parents find the idea of “play” to be a source of frustration. Some find it boring, some find it confusing, and many simply feel that they don’t know how to play. I often hear parents say, “Nobody played with me when I was a child, so now I don’t know how to play with my child.”. The good news is that you don’t need to work nearly so hard in order to engage meaningfully with your child. Children come preprogrammed to play – it is how they learn to explore their environment, make sense of their world, and build a whole host of skills – so if you take a step back, you’ll see that your child can teach you everything you need to know.

The importance of play

Research shows that play serves a number of integral functions in a child’s development. Play:

  • Offers opportunities to build mastery (for example, playing with small kitchen equipment builds fine motor skills),
  • Helps develop self-regulatory capacities (when things don’t go as planned during play, such as a tower falling over, children practice frustration tolerance),
  • Allows them to work on problem-solving skills (such as how to rebuild that tower with a stronger foundation). It also exercises their communication skills. Think about how much language they can use during a tea party or when playing doctor; and
  • Gives them an opportunity to try out and rehearse different roles, practice following societal expectations, and work through difficult moments.

While children can build on each of these skills through independent play, playing with a parent offers opportunities to expand on these skills, to play out more complex themes, and most importantly, to deepen and enrich intimacy and bonding in the parent-child relationship. Particularly in the era of social distancing, when children are largely suffering the loss of a peer group, they need us more than ever to support them in fulfilling this foundational task of childhood.

So if the idea of playing with your child seems off-putting or tiresome, read on for some simple strategies to take off some pressure, increase the positive impact, and actually make play fun for both you and your child.

Let Your Child Take the Lead

He’s the boss, sort of (Photo by Pixabay)

Letting your child take the lead is perhaps the single most important advice I can give. This is particularly true for parents who struggle to figure out what to do during play. Your child knows what to do, and he will show you. Children spend most of the day following the rules and expectations of adults. Free play is an opportunity for them to explore, to feel in control, and to take a load off from trying to do the “right” thing all the time.

So if your child uses playtime to order you around or doesn’t seem willing to accept your suggestions, that’s okay. Resist the impulse to assert yourself, and just watch how the play unfolds. If you’re playing with dolls, and you have one doll say to another, “It’s time for dinner,” and your child responds, “No, he doesn’t say that,” this does not mean that your child is being bossy or uncompromising. Rather, your child is hard at work exploring the environment in a way that is meaningful to him. Follow his cues and play along with the scene he is concocting. You may find that he’s actually trying to work through a problem he’s facing or make sense of things he’s observed in his environment (more on that in a minute…).

But Also Structure the Environment to be Tolerable to You!

It’s okay for you to have fun, too (Photo by Gustavo)

Yes, it’s important to let your child choose the activity and be in control of how the play unfolds. However, if you absolutely hate playing dress-up or building with Magnatiles, nobody’s going to have a good time. So when you are playing together, take some pressure off yourself and keep any activity that would drive you up a wall in a closet for another time. Instead, lay out two to four different activities that you can see yourself enjoying for your child to choose from, and let her take the lead from there.

You Don’t Need to Give Up Your Whole Day, but Be Consistent

It’s hard to find the time to sit down and play when you have so many competing demands – cooking dinner, cleaning the house, helping an older child with homework, attending to any of your own work you may have, the list goes on. If you’re short on time, that’s okay!

According to studies done about one type of play-based therapy called Parent Child Interaction Therapy (or PCIT for short), you can have a positive impact on your child in as little as five minutes per day. So long as two things are true:

  1. You spend five minutes playing with your child EVERY day – that means seven days per week, 52 weeks per year. And,
  2. you make those five minutes count. That means being totally present – not checking your phone, not folding laundry, not spacing out.

If you can give your child at least five minutes of one on one playtime every single day, you are likely to see a decrease in difficult-to-manage, attention-seeking behavior at other times. Knowing he can count on having that important bonding time with you no matter what will provide him a sense of stability and connection in your relationship that will pay off for years to come!

Finally, Listen to What They’re Really Telling You

Listen… (Photo by Gustavo)

You can learn a lot about how your child experiences the world by paying attention to the themes that come up in his play. This is another reason letting her take the lead is so important. Parents often feel they need to “correct” their child if she does something socially awkward or out of the norm when playing. For example, if your child uses one doll to hit another doll, you might feel an urge to pivot the play to make the doll apologize. But it’s actually really healthy for your child to play out those impulses – it could be that she is discharging her aggression in a safe way (through toys rather than with her own body), or that she is experimenting with what it feels like to be the aggressor and/or the victim. Playing out aggressive themes doesn’t necessarily mean your child will become aggressive – if anything, chances are it will decrease aggression behavior because she has an appropriate outlet.

The easiest way to spot a deeper message in your child’s play is if you notice something recurs. Sometimes parents get tired of their child playing out the same exact scene over and over, but this is actually a fascinating strategy children use to come to terms with what they’ve experienced.

I was recently playing with a family friend’s daughter who wanted to play doctor. For over an hour, she had me pretend to be different patients – and each one had the flu, and each one died. Unsurprisingly, I learned that she had recently had the flu and had spent a lot of time at the doctor’s office. By playing out her biggest fear over and over, that having the flu could result in death, she was using play (the language of childhood) to communicate her feelings, face her fear head on, and work through it. After we played out this scene about a hundred times, she was satisfied and wanted to go play with Legos instead. According to her parents, that was the last time she brought up the doctor for a while.

Come on, let’s play!

So when it comes to playing with your child, you don’t have to worry about coming up with the perfect activity or maximizing “teachable moments”. Your child will gain the most from playing with you if you take a backseat and let him direct the show!

Categories : Advice, Parenting
Tags : ,

Managing Strong Emotions

By zfortadmin
Wednesday, July 13th, 2022

Managing Strong Emotional Reactions in Children and Teens

Woman in Gray Tank Top

Have you ever been so overwhelmed with an emotion that it felt all-consuming? Like you were stuck in a deep, dark emotion pit without a ladder? When emotions take the reins, they can make it really hard to focus on the situation at hand, to process logical reasoning, and to problem-solve. The crippling impact of overwhelming emotion is even stronger for children and adolescents, because they are still developing neurologically and don’t have the same capacities as adults to self-regulate. So what is a parent to do when their child is swallowed up by fear, worry, anger, or sadness? Following are some tips to help you help your child manage strong emotions:

Address the Emotion

Father holding cheeks of son in face mask

When children or teens are having meltdowns, many parents try to speak to them rationally. While parents do this with the best of intentions, the problem is that when somebody is in an emotional tailspin, the logical part of their brain is completely shut down. Even the most revelatory comment will go straight over their heads until the emotional arousal comes down.

So when emotion carries your child away, instead of trying to problem-solve, start by addressing the emotion. If they are too far gone to access language, label the emotion for them (e.g., “I can see that you are very upset”) and validate why they feel so upset, even if you feel they are behaving inappropriately (e.g., “I understand that you are really mad that you have to finish your homework before you watch TV”). Oftentimes having somebody acknowledge how you feel helps bring the level of the emotion down to a tolerable level, which then makes it easier to reflect, redirect, and problem-solve.

Help Your Child Ground

Person Wearing Red Hoodie

Another way to bring down emotional arousal is to force the brain to think about something else. “Grounding” skills are techniques that are designed to direct your focus to something occurring in the present moment, rather than having your brain carried off by emotion.

One helpful grounding skill is the 5 Senses Activity. Guide your child to identify:

  • 5 things they can see
  • 4 things they can hear
  • 3 things they can touch
  • 2 things they can smell, and
  • 1 thing they can taste.

In a pinch, you can do even simpler grounding activities, such as counting activities (e.g., How many light switches do you see in the room? How many tiles are on the floor? How many surfaces can you sit on?). Try it yourself right now – the more you have to focus on something in your immediate environment, the harder it is for your brain to get distracted by anything else, which gives your emotions time to cool off.

Preempt the Emotion

Close-up Photography Of A Girl Eating Bread

These first couple skills are for use in the moment, when the emotion has already taken over. In the long run, it can help to identify patterns and warning signs. Spend some time observing your child and getting a feel for common triggers. This can help you preempt significant escalations in emotion (for example, if your child tends to get “hangry”, save difficult conversations for after they’ve had a snack).

That said, it’s also good for children to learn to “build the muscle” of tolerating difficult emotion (the world won’t always be able to accommodate them as well as a parent can!), but this needs to happen in a graduated way. In calm, quiet moments, work with your child to help them identify when they tend to get upset and how they know their emotions are rising. What do they feel in their body? What thoughts go through their head? Once they become familiar enough with their own signs of emotional arousal, they can practice self-regulation skills before it’s too late, such as deep breathing, positive mental imagery, or separating themselves from a difficult situation. At first, you may need to help guide them to use these skills when you notice an uptick in emotional arousal, but in time, these skills will become more automatic, and they will be better able to initiate self-regulation strategies independently.

Model Self-Regulation Skills

Child With Woman Holding Map

Children learn about emotions from those around them. The more you are able to regulate your own emotions, the more they learn to do so themselves. This doesn’t mean being an emotion robot – many parents worry about their kids seeing them upset. What’s most helpful to kids is to see that it’s okay to feel these feelings (at safe levels), and that there’s something they can do about it. So when you’re upset about things, it’s healthy to let it show in front of your kids in small doses, to talk about your feelings in developmentally-appropriate language, and most importantly, to talk about what you’re going to do to help yourself feel more calm. Young children will enjoy joining you in self-regulation activities, such as the ones listed above, and it will be good practice for them to get into the habit!

Build Your Own Tolerance For Their Distress

Ethnic father and kid relaxing in bedroom

While children are growing, their bodies are too small to handle the big emotions they sometimes feel. It is typical for children to have big reactions to strong feelings while they get the hang of self-regulation. The goal is to help them feel confident in their abilities to self-soothe, but this doesn’t happen overnight, and too much pressure to regulate faster than their bodies are capable of can hinder the process. 

When your child is having a meltdown, remind yourself that they are doing their best in that moment, and you can continue to help them build their regulatory muscles when they are calm again. Take a few deep breaths, and trust that if you are able to stay regulated yourself in those most difficult of moments, it will help your child see that they are safe and protected by you even when they don’t feel safe and protected in their own bodies. And remind yourself that you are doing your best, too! Learning to self-regulate is hard work for everybody. It’s okay if it feels impossible sometimes. It will become easier in time!

Still too much?

As always, reach out to us if you need more information or help.

Categories : Advice, Parenting, Sensory Processing
Tags : , ,

Managing Strong Emotions

By zfortadmin
Friday, November 13th, 2020

Managing Strong Emotional Reactions in Children and Teens

Woman in Gray Tank Top

Have you ever been so overwhelmed with an emotion that it felt all-consuming? Like you were stuck in a deep, dark emotion pit without a ladder? When emotions take the reins, they can make it really hard to focus on the situation at hand, to process logical reasoning, and to problem-solve. The crippling impact of overwhelming emotion is even stronger for children and adolescents, because they are still developing neurologically and don’t have the same capacities as adults to self-regulate. So what is a parent to do when their child is swallowed up by fear, worry, anger, or sadness? Following are some tips to help you help your child manage strong emotions:

Address the Emotion

Father holding cheeks of son in face mask

When children or teens are having meltdowns, many parents try to speak to them rationally. While parents do this with the best of intentions, the problem is that when somebody is in an emotional tailspin, the logical part of their brain is completely shut down. Even the most revelatory comment will go straight over their heads until the emotional arousal comes down.

So when emotion carries your child away, instead of trying to problem-solve, start by addressing the emotion. If they are too far gone to access language, label the emotion for them (e.g., “I can see that you are very upset”) and validate why they feel so upset, even if you feel they are behaving inappropriately (e.g., “I understand that you are really mad that you have to finish your homework before you watch TV”). Oftentimes having somebody acknowledge how you feel helps bring the level of the emotion down to a tolerable level, which then makes it easier to reflect, redirect, and problem-solve.

Help Your Child Ground

Person Wearing Red Hoodie

Another way to bring down emotional arousal is to force the brain to think about something else. “Grounding” skills are techniques that are designed to direct your focus to something occurring in the present moment, rather than having your brain carried off by emotion.

One helpful grounding skill is the 5 Senses Activity. Guide your child to identify:

  • 5 things they can see
  • 4 things they can hear
  • 3 things they can touch
  • 2 things they can smell, and
  • 1 thing they can taste.

In a pinch, you can do even simpler grounding activities, such as counting activities (e.g., How many light switches do you see in the room? How many tiles are on the floor? How many surfaces can you sit on?). Try it yourself right now – the more you have to focus on something in your immediate environment, the harder it is for your brain to get distracted by anything else, which gives your emotions time to cool off.

Preempt the Emotion

Close-up Photography Of A Girl Eating Bread

These first couple skills are for use in the moment, when the emotion has already taken over. In the long run, it can help to identify patterns and warning signs. Spend some time observing your child and getting a feel for common triggers. This can help you preempt significant escalations in emotion (for example, if your child tends to get “hangry”, save difficult conversations for after they’ve had a snack).

That said, it’s also good for children to learn to “build the muscle” of tolerating difficult emotion (the world won’t always be able to accommodate them as well as a parent can!), but this needs to happen in a graduated way. In calm, quiet moments, work with your child to help them identify when they tend to get upset and how they know their emotions are rising. What do they feel in their body? What thoughts go through their head? Once they become familiar enough with their own signs of emotional arousal, they can practice self-regulation skills before it’s too late, such as deep breathing, positive mental imagery, or separating themselves from a difficult situation. At first, you may need to help guide them to use these skills when you notice an uptick in emotional arousal, but in time, these skills will become more automatic, and they will be better able to initiate self-regulation strategies independently.

Model Self-Regulation Skills

Child With Woman Holding Map

Children learn about emotions from those around them. The more you are able to regulate your own emotions, the more they learn to do so themselves. This doesn’t mean being an emotion robot – many parents worry about their kids seeing them upset. What’s most helpful to kids is to see that it’s okay to feel these feelings (at safe levels), and that there’s something they can do about it. So when you’re upset about things, it’s healthy to let it show in front of your kids in small doses, to talk about your feelings in developmentally-appropriate language, and most importantly, to talk about what you’re going to do to help yourself feel more calm. Young children will enjoy joining you in self-regulation activities, such as the ones listed above, and it will be good practice for them to get into the habit!

Build Your Own Tolerance For Their Distress

Ethnic father and kid relaxing in bedroom

While children are growing, their bodies are too small to handle the big emotions they sometimes feel. It is typical for children to have big reactions to strong feelings while they get the hang of self-regulation. The goal is to help them feel confident in their abilities to self-soothe, but this doesn’t happen overnight, and too much pressure to regulate faster than their bodies are capable of can hinder the process. 

When your child is having a meltdown, remind yourself that they are doing their best in that moment, and you can continue to help them build their regulatory muscles when they are calm again. Take a few deep breaths, and trust that if you are able to stay regulated yourself in those most difficult of moments, it will help your child see that they are safe and protected by you even when they don’t feel safe and protected in their own bodies. And remind yourself that you are doing your best, too! Learning to self-regulate is hard work for everybody. It’s okay if it feels impossible sometimes. It will become easier in time!

Still too much?

As always, reach out to us if you need more information or help.

Categories : Advice, Parenting, Sensory Processing
Tags : , ,

How to Play

By zfortadmin
Friday, April 24th, 2020
play spelled out with toddler blocks
Come on, let’s play! (Photo by Skitterphoto)

How to Play
(With Your Child)

A lot of parents find the idea of “play” to be a source of frustration. Some find it boring, some find it confusing, and many simply feel that they don’t know how to play. I often hear parents say, “Nobody played with me when I was a child, so now I don’t know how to play with my child.”. The good news is that you don’t need to work nearly so hard in order to engage meaningfully with your child. Children come preprogrammed to play – it is how they learn to explore their environment, make sense of their world, and build a whole host of skills – so if you take a step back, you’ll see that your child can teach you everything you need to know.

The importance of play

Research shows that play serves a number of integral functions in a child’s development. Play:

  • Offers opportunities to build mastery (for example, playing with small kitchen equipment builds fine motor skills),
  • Helps develop self-regulatory capacities (when things don’t go as planned during play, such as a tower falling over, children practice frustration tolerance),
  • Allows them to work on problem-solving skills (such as how to rebuild that tower with a stronger foundation). It also exercises their communication skills. Think about how much language they can use during a tea party or when playing doctor; and
  • Gives them an opportunity to try out and rehearse different roles, practice following societal expectations, and work through difficult moments.

While children can build on each of these skills through independent play, playing with a parent offers opportunities to expand on these skills, to play out more complex themes, and most importantly, to deepen and enrich intimacy and bonding in the parent-child relationship. Particularly in the era of social distancing, when children are largely suffering the loss of a peer group, they need us more than ever to support them in fulfilling this foundational task of childhood.

So if the idea of playing with your child seems off-putting or tiresome, read on for some simple strategies to take off some pressure, increase the positive impact, and actually make play fun for both you and your child.

Let Your Child Take the Lead

toddler playing on floor
He’s the boss, sort of (Photo by Pixabay)

Letting your child take the lead is perhaps the single most important advice I can give. This is particularly true for parents who struggle to figure out what to do during play. Your child knows what to do, and he will show you. Children spend most of the day following the rules and expectations of adults. Free play is an opportunity for them to explore, to feel in control, and to take a load off from trying to do the “right” thing all the time.

So if your child uses playtime to order you around or doesn’t seem willing to accept your suggestions, that’s okay. Resist the impulse to assert yourself, and just watch how the play unfolds. If you’re playing with dolls, and you have one doll say to another, “It’s time for dinner,” and your child responds, “No, he doesn’t say that,” this does not mean that your child is being bossy or uncompromising. Rather, your child is hard at work exploring the environment in a way that is meaningful to him. Follow his cues and play along with the scene he is concocting. You may find that he’s actually trying to work through a problem he’s facing or make sense of things he’s observed in his environment (more on that in a minute…).

But Also Structure the Environment to be Tolerable to You!

mom riding on scooter with son
It’s okay for you to have fun, too (Photo by Gustavo)

Yes, it’s important to let your child choose the activity and be in control of how the play unfolds. However, if you absolutely hate playing dress-up or building with Magnatiles, nobody’s going to have a good time. So when you are playing together, take some pressure off yourself and keep any activity that would drive you up a wall in a closet for another time. Instead, lay out two to four different activities that you can see yourself enjoying for your child to choose from, and let her take the lead from there.

You Don’t Need to Give Up Your Whole Day, but Be Consistent

It’s hard to find the time to sit down and play when you have so many competing demands – cooking dinner, cleaning the house, helping an older child with homework, attending to any of your own work you may have, the list goes on. If you’re short on time, that’s okay!

According to studies done about one type of play-based therapy called Parent Child Interaction Therapy (or PCIT for short), you can have a positive impact on your child in as little as five minutes per day. So long as two things are true:

  1. You spend five minutes playing with your child EVERY day – that means seven days per week, 52 weeks per year. And,
  2. you make those five minutes count. That means being totally present – not checking your phone, not folding laundry, not spacing out.

If you can give your child at least five minutes of one on one playtime every single day, you are likely to see a decrease in difficult-to-manage, attention-seeking behavior at other times. Knowing he can count on having that important bonding time with you no matter what will provide him a sense of stability and connection in your relationship that will pay off for years to come!

Finally, Listen to What They’re Really Telling You

mom playing toys with daughter
Listen… (Photo by Gustavo)

You can learn a lot about how your child experiences the world by paying attention to the themes that come up in his play. This is another reason letting her take the lead is so important. Parents often feel they need to “correct” their child if she does something socially awkward or out of the norm when playing. For example, if your child uses one doll to hit another doll, you might feel an urge to pivot the play to make the doll apologize. But it’s actually really healthy for your child to play out those impulses – it could be that she is discharging her aggression in a safe way (through toys rather than with her own body), or that she is experimenting with what it feels like to be the aggressor and/or the victim. Playing out aggressive themes doesn’t necessarily mean your child will become aggressive – if anything, chances are it will decrease aggression behavior because she has an appropriate outlet.

The easiest way to spot a deeper message in your child’s play is if you notice something recurs. Sometimes parents get tired of their child playing out the same exact scene over and over, but this is actually a fascinating strategy children use to come to terms with what they’ve experienced.

I was recently playing with a family friend’s daughter who wanted to play doctor. For over an hour, she had me pretend to be different patients – and each one had the flu, and each one died. Unsurprisingly, I learned that she had recently had the flu and had spent a lot of time at the doctor’s office. By playing out her biggest fear over and over, that having the flu could result in death, she was using play (the language of childhood) to communicate her feelings, face her fear head on, and work through it. After we played out this scene about a hundred times, she was satisfied and wanted to go play with Legos instead. According to her parents, that was the last time she brought up the doctor for a while.

Come on, let’s play!

So when it comes to playing with your child, you don’t have to worry about coming up with the perfect activity or maximizing “teachable moments”. Your child will gain the most from playing with you if you take a backseat and let him direct the show!

Categories : Advice, Parenting
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