None of us can deny this simple, heartwarming truth: children love to play. Over the years, pediatric specialists have studied this universal behavior to better understand how it supports childhood development and how it can be incorporated into healthcare services, especially pediatric occupational therapy.
When pediatric occupational therapists include play in treatment plans, children are able to strengthen different areas of their growth: social-emotional, language and communication, cognitive, and movement and physical development.
Let’s review what occupational therapy is, learn how play supports childhood development during therapy sessions, and explore why combining play and occupational therapy leads to effective and engaging care for children.
What Is Occupational Therapy for Children?
Pediatric occupational therapy focuses on improving how children explore, experience, and engage with the world around them. Occupational therapy not only helps children navigate environments, situations, and activities with independence while being regulated, but it also empowers them to participate in playtime with courage and excitement.
When children experience challenges in their daily activities or routines due to medical conditions, traumatic injuries, developmental delays, or environmental factors, occupational therapy is a highly supportive and effective option. As a child works with a skilled pediatric occupational therapist, they gain skills, tools, and strategies to live a happy, fulfilling life.
Occupational therapy can support development in the following areas:
- Executive Function and Life Skills: These thinking abilities help us in everyday tasks, such as regulating feelings, adapting to different settings or situations, developing and completing plans, following directions, and focusing.
- Fine Motor Skills: These tiny, precise muscle movements of the wrists, hands, and fingers help us navigate various activities, such as brushing our teeth, getting dressed, or tying our shoes.
- Gross Motor Skills: These large, expansive muscle movements of the legs, torso, or arms help us perform actions like walking, climbing, or kicking. These movements also relate to infant development in early motor skills such as rolling, sitting, crawling, and walking!
- Visual Perception Skills: These visual processing abilities help us look at details around us and understand what we see, such as looking at letters on a page and identifying which letters we are seeing.
- Visual Motor Integration Skills: These abilities help us respond to things we see in our environment with appropriate actions, such as seeing a ball coming at us and catching it rather than being struck by it or seeing words on a chalkboard in a classroom and being able to copy them onto our paper accurately.
- Sensory Processing and Regulation Skills: Sensory processing relates to the different senses we are experiencing (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, proprioception, vestibular, interoception), how we interpret them, and how we respond to them. For example, when a child steps on a sidewalk with bare feet during a hot summer day, they process this sensory input as “this hurts my feet” and react by jumping somewhere cooler, like the grass or a shaded spot. Afterwards, the child may regulate their reaction by seeking comfort, and may even avoid walking barefoot on hot sidewalks in the future.
What Exactly Is Play?
Play is when we engage in activities aligned with our own interests or ideas, leading us to experience pleasure and sometimes lose track of time. Play can look different for everybody!
Just imagine your favorite activity is playing volleyball. During the summer, you get a group of your friends together and rush to the beach. You play a lighthearted morning game, followed by splashing in the waves and enjoying a picnic you all prepared together. You and your friends are playing. You are filled with joy and losing your sense of time because you are in the moment, soaking up everything that is exciting and memorable.
All of this? It feels like living life to the fullest. This is the power of play at work.
Why Is Play Embedded into Pediatric Occupational Therapy?
When we incorporate play into pediatric occupational therapy for children, we create a highly effective approach for meeting therapy goals.
Play is how we can design therapy sessions that empower children to thrive in everyday life — by making their therapy activities feel fun and self-directed. This is a huge reason why play works so well in occupational therapy.
In addition to making pediatric occupational therapy engaging, play enticingly retains a child’s attention during sessions and naturally supports their overall development, making play an advantageous and holistic therapeutic technique.
In occupational therapy, play delights and empowers children as they learn new skills and grow.
How Does Play Help Achieve Therapy Goals?
In occupational therapy at More to Say, play is at the heart of therapy. When participating in play-based activities, children can happily develop important abilities that strengthen their sense of independence and confidence in daily living.
To better understand this effective combination of play and occupational therapy, here are some play-based activities pediatric occupational therapist may use during clinical sessions to build a variety of skills:
- Board Games (like Candy Land or Clue): Improve rule-following, problem-solving, patience, self-expression, and emotional regulation.
- Pretend Play: Develops communication, empathy, gestural abilities, body language usage, and comprehension skills.
- Puzzles (like Picture Puzzles or Jenga): Refines visual problem-solving, memorization, dexterity, spatial awareness, and planning and organization skills.
- Floor Games (like Twister): Strengthen muscles, mobility and flexibility, hand-eye coordination, and balance and coordination.
How Does the More to Say Team Use Play in Occupational Therapy?
Our approach to occupational therapy is not only evidence-based and developmentally appropriate, but also child-led and play-based. We incorporate play into our sessions because it helps in two areas: it keeps each child interested and engaged while participating in therapy activities and it supports growth in all domains of childhood development. This is how we reach the best results.
Here at More to Say Pediatric Development & Therapy, we believe every child deserves an opportunity to learn how to thrive in life, especially in ways that are enjoyable. This is why we deliver exceptional, individualized treatments to children through play-based, child-led pediatric occupational therapy. This is how we help each child learn and master essential skills to successfully explore, experience, and engage with the world.
Contact More to Say for Professional Care
If you have any questions about how play-based, evidence-informed occupational therapy sessions could support your child’s growth, call us today at (203) 828-6790 to gather more information or schedule your free phone consultation.
