Caregivers

Here, you will gain education regarding your roles and responsibilities while your child receives occupational therapy services and helpful tools to support your child's occupational needs.

Roles & Responsibilities Of Caregivers

How Do Senses Relate To Occupation?

Occupational therapy practitioners use theoretical models or frames of references to provide evidence-based practice interventions to support occupational participation and performance. They provide a better understanding of how the environment, context of the activity, and motivation impact your child’s engagement and performance in everyday activities (activities of daily living, instrumental activities of daily living, socioemotional skills, leisure, education, and sleep/rest).









So how can your child’s ability to understand their senses impact optimal participation in daily activities?


The Model Of Human Occupation

  • What makes a person want to engage in certain activities?

  • What habits, patterns, and routines contribute to an individual’s identity and ability to perform tasks?

Sensory Based Intervention

  • Sensory integration is a foundation for learning. Our senses can be compared to the foundation of a house. We all have sensory systems that are formed by our individual senses and how we understand those senses.

  • How does your child perceive, modulate, organize, and interpret their surroundings?

  • How does this interpretation impact their ability to create routine and predictability?

  • What activities are impacted by your child’s ability to understand their sensations in a given environment?


Child Development Pyramid

Your child’s development can be thought of as a ‘pyramid.’ When they successfully develop and utilize one component of their central nervous system, they can build upon that to allow for higher cognitive thinking which affords them the ability to explore and engage in daily activities of living.


So how can your child’s ability to understand their sensory systems impact their ability to perform daily and meaningful activities?


As a result of adverse childhood experiences, we must address the impact that trauma has on brain development. Often, this includes interference with how your child may perceive or interact with their environment while completing their daily activities (Van de Kolk, 2003).


Your child is simultaneously interacting with and impacted by the environment with or without their knowledge; physical, social, occupational, cultural, economic, and political aspects of the environment (Forsyth et al., 2019). While a child is continuously perceiving, modulating, organizing, and interpreting sensations from the environment, they may react inappropriately secondary to the impact of ACEs (Fraser et al., 2017; May-Benson, 2016). This can then impact their motivation to choose or complete activities, their ability to create habits and roles, and limit their performance capacity.


Therefore, creating daily sensory schedules can help provide your child with a sense of routine and predictability which may help them better integrate their sensory systems while interacting with various environments.


Let's Talk Emotional Regulation!

Exposure to early childhood trauma may provoke deficits in your child’s developmental and sensory components of their daily occupations. This can make it hard for them to regulate or express their emotions, which results in maladaptive behavioral responses. Let’s talk about emotional regulation to help your child understand self-regulation strategies, regain a sense of control, increase self-worth, and feel a sense of personal safety to facilitate appropriate behavioral changes needed to complete daily occupations.


What Is Emotional Regulation?

  • This is the awareness and understanding of one's emotions. It is how your child understands the impact of their emotions on their behavior and their ability to manage emotions in a positive manner.


How Can Emotional Regulation Strategies Help Your Child?

  • Emotional regulation strategies help to calm your child down and control negative emotions during distress.

  • Teaches your child how to display more appropriate responses to emotional situations while decreasing aggression and dangerous behaviors.

  • Promotes positive social relationships.

  • Encourages independence and self-care tasks while you may see increased exploratory activities.

  • Enables smooth transitions between tasks or life milestones.

  • Overall, emotional regulation strategies help your child overcome emotional distress in order to successfully carry-out their daily occupations.

How Can You Promote Emotional Regulation?

  • Display healthy emotional regulation skills for your child by recognizing your own emotions and speaking about them with your child when appropriate.

  • Discuss emotional regulation with your child on a regular basis and brainstorm together about strategies that may work for them.


What Zone Am I In?

Using the zones of regulation can help children learn strategies to self-regulate their emotional and sensory needs in order to complete a task. Self-regulation aims to teach children the best state of alertness of their body and emotions for a specific situation and how to respond to the demands of the environment around them. Such as knowing how to respond to their level of regulation required inside the classroom, on a playground, in the home, or out in the community.

How Zones Of Regulation Can Help

This strategy combines social thinking concepts and visual aids to help children:

  • Identify feelings, control impulses, and self-regulate

  • Understand how behaviors affect themselves and others around them

  • Learn and implement tools that help them return to an appropriate state

  • Build awareness of their emotions and recognize when they need to use emotional regulation strategies

  • Examine why their behaviors occurred in that context

  • Problem-solve through difficult emotional situations

  • Gain increased emotional vocabulary

  • Obtain a greater understanding of social cues

  • Use calming and alerting strategies




What Are The Zones Of Regulation?

We can help kiddos understand how to regulate their emotions by helping them group feelings into four colored zones. This can help them recognize their zone and use strategies to change or stay in the zone they are in.

Blue Zone: Low states of alertness and down feelings.

  • Your child may feel sad, tired, sick, or bored. Allow them time to re-energize and have a resting area.

Green Zone: Calm state of alertness

  • Your child may feel happy, focused, content, or ready to learn. This is often the optimal or ideal zone that we want to get to with the most sense of control.

Yellow Zone: Heightened state of alertness and elevated emotions

  • Your child may feel stressed, frustrated, anxious, excited, silly, or nervous

Red Zone: Extremely heightened state of alertness and intense emotions

  • Your child may feel elated or experiencing anger, devastation, or terror



Help Your Child Use Their Zones

  • Incorporate your own zones into conversations with your kiddo throughout the day

    • Such as, “I’m really tired and feel like I am in the blue zone, I might need to go take a nap and help myself get back to green!”

  • Help remind your child of their zones by making observations and asking them questions to help them gain awareness

  • Brainstorm strategies together to help self-regulate when they are unable. This shows that you are validating their emotional state but are also there for support

  • Try explaining how your child’s state is currently affecting your/others’ zone and how you feel

  • Simply ask your child what zone they are in, don’t always wait until there is a situation when the zones are now ‘needed’

  • Help your child journal their zones to show support

  • Always respond positively when your child recognizes their zone and is able to regulate their behaviors


How Can I Feed My Senses?