An awesome book review of Retro Baby written by our very own OT blogger/awesome clinician/writer, Anne Zachry….can’t wait to get a copy soon. 🙂 I 100% agree with her…retro is the way to go, yo 😉

I will come back to clarify more later, but this video has gone viral and it shows some of the NICU pieces…which is where i am headed right now, to go hold sick babies. 

OTs can work in NICUs too, although it’s advanced/skilled so nothing you can jump into. MORE LATER

I completely agree. I don’t care how educational the game or show is – SCREEN TIME IS HORRIBLE FOR CHILDREN!!!!!!! They should not be interacting with screens! They need to develop via real life activities and play, lots of running around, spinning, jumping, crawling, carrying things, experimenting with textures and abstract objects, using their eyes to focus on near and far distance, learning the world around them…

Screen time is not great for any kid, but especially the youngest ones – I truly believe one of the reasons the kids heading into school today are SO much more delayed in basic motor skills than in the past (visual motor, ocular motor,gross motor, fine motor, sensory motor, etc) is partially due to such extensive screen time. Lots of other reasons too.

And yes, I’m hypocritical as I know screen time is super motivating and easy to use and I sometimes use it too. Just don’t be fooled that it’s good for kids for more than a few minutes at a time a day. Ideally none.

*As I mentioned at top – certain cases and situations, especially for children with difficulties, are exceptions to the rule – but overall, for typically developing children, it is not ideal. And I realize the article linked is not exactly a high-level evidence article, but I do see that more and more professionals are realizing the harm it is doing. 

She skimmed it and looked at me and said “Ohhh, you’re Miss Awesomeness?” in the tone of “Ooohhhh, so that’s whose name I have heard.” I was like ISN’T IT OBVIOUS!!!!!! 😉 

I hadn’t thought about it quite that way – many of my kids reference coming up or going to see Miss Awesomeness, so I guess for classmates who don’t typically see me, it’s like hmmm who is this mystery lady.

I looooooove my kids. They melt me up daily. I wish so bad I had an extra five thousand hours a day to give each one of them all they need, daily, and also have enough time to BLOG about it, Pinterest it, etc. I have so many pictures I take of projects I want to share for example. Last few days has involved typical FCS as I now call it, aka Functional Classroom Skills, but I’ve also been adding in BUBBLE LETTERS, WACKY LOOP BRACELETS, basic 3-D shapes that look cool, and ZENTANGLES. All of which work on amazing skills but in ways that make them proud. More later when my eyeballs are not fusing shut. 

I freaking LOVED this description/photographs of these parents staging elaborate dinosaur figurine events during November. Kids will remember that kind of silly whimsy all their lives. Kids these days seem to get plenty of screen time and structure time so it seems like they get more than enough play, but I would argue there is an INCREDIBLE deficit in more elaborate, unstructured, spontaneous play or appreciation of creativity just for the fun of it.

Great study done. Essentially asking older people to do puzzles and basic “cognitive” tasks didn’t do much, but if it was made meaningful/intriguing, they did awesome after a 14 week study. The digital photography group did the best, although there were other great combinations as well. I recommend skimming the article above, the take-away message is definitely the philosophy that occupational therapy espouses – activity without meaning is nearly worthless. Activities with meaning dramatically improve a variety of skills. 

I see it in my own life. I think we all do. Give us challenging tasks and whether we succeed depends heavily on motivation and meaning

One of my first “real life” examples of the importance of meaning was on a Level 1 OT 2-week fieldwork in a rehab setting, working with a patient who needed to improve standing tolerance. We did small activities that were “meaningful enough” while standing and he would tolerate roughly 3 minutes before needing to sit and take a break from it. I found out he was a big traveller and liked to talk about going all over the United States. I went and found a dollar store USA-states puzzle and asked him to pull out the states he loved the most and tell me about his adventures there, while completing the puzzle. He stayed up nearly eleven minutes as he was so engrossed. His activity tolerance that time was approximately THREE TIMES as long, due to MEANING.  OCCUPATION.

Survive + Occupational Therapy = Thrive

NEW TSHIRT LOGO BABY! It may already exist…usually my brilliance is always found to be too late 😉 ahahahaha

Fictional yet real-life typical scenario:

Jack is in the first grade and he is having a lot of trouble with letter formation. He is left-handed and his right-handed teacher always sits to his left-side when teaching, because of how her chair and his desk are situated. She carefully shows him how to make the letters, how to hold the pencil, and the sequence of strokes. Jack tries, but can’t seem to get it right. He grows frustrated with his inability, and she does as well, because she JUST SHOWED HIM. What she doesn’t realize is that all her careful work means almost nothing, because she is blocking his view the entire time and all he sees is the back of her hand doing some random/vague moments. This provides him with no useful information he can copy. Since Jack doesn’t realize there could be a better vantage point, he just assumes he is failing to understand. Both Jack and his teacher are unhappy with the outcome, because neither realize what the other is missing. Neither of them “know what they don’t know”. 

*Common sense rule #1: Common sense is not common. I have super amazing problem-solving genius engineers/rocket scientists parents not know which side to sit on when their kid is writing. 

If any of you have ideas or thoughts on how to best sit with the child depending on handedness or other factors (as maybe I’m missing something huge!) please share 🙂 

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Longer version (after I processed here, I went back up and wrote the minier version)

I’ve noticed that a lot of our OT kids either “don’t know what they don’t know”, or are too scared to say something, or know something is wrong but don’t know how to make it right.

For example, if I am working with a right-handed child, I sit on their left-side since I’m left-handed. That way the child sees what I am doing with my fingers, and I can see what the child is doing. If I work with a left-hander, I sit on their right side, and when it’s time to write, I’m going to figure out whether it’s best for me to write with my right-hand for that child, or to write “around them” (like standing behind them and wrapping my hands so they are at the same angle as the child’s), or to write “above them” in a somewhat upside down stance for me. 

Luckily, most of my kids are right-handers, and so as a left-hander I just always stay on their left. I prefer to always be by their side rather than across from them, because I too have spatial issues and find spatial rotations challenging. It pays to practice handwriting with both hands. It’s fine if your non-dominant hand isn’t great, as long as it’s good enough. It’s like when you watch an expert do something on Youtube and it seems like it will never be achievable, but if you watch an amateur do it you are like oooh I can get there. So if your handwriting isn’t PERFECT with your non-dominant hand, that’s fine! 

You can also just switch back and forth depending on what you are doing, ie show the child on his left, then watch the child on his right, etc. 

The reason I went into this diatribe is because sometimes right-handed parents sit to the left side of their right-handed child without even thinking about it. The parent can see what the child is doing, but the child can NOT see what the parent is doing. The parent is saying “Do it like I do” and from the child’s vantage point, they see the back of a hand vaguely moving. Many higher executive-functioning “neurotypical” kids may complain “I can’t see anything!” but many of our OT kids will just know that they never seem to understand when someone shows them “do it like I did”. 

The kid doesn’t know what they don’t know, and since we aren’t mind readers, we often don’t realize the basic issue a child is missing, and assume it’s something graver.