Occupational Therapy

A Resilient State of Mind: Dealing with Failure

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Part of a child’s job is to learn, and failure is an inevitable part of learning. Failure is also an inevitable part of building resilience. Resilience is the ability to face life’s stressors/challenges, learn from mistakes, and recover. It’s a big cause and effect game happening in your child’s brain.

Our kids fail all the time, especially when communicating what they want or need in the first years of life. As they get older and experiment with boundaries and connect information, they can organize all of that cause and effect and turn it into action. They figure out what works (asking for help) and what doesn’t (throwing a fit), learning and adapting with each new situation.

But somewhere in their early school years, our kids can start viewing failure as a bad thing, limiting their exposure to new experiences, encounters, and achievements. What caused this switch and how can we help our kids embrace failure rather than avoid it?

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Growing the Executive Branch, pt. 2: Ages and Stages of Executive Functions

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Executive function is a group of cognitive processes that help us analyze information to appropriately complete tasks or respond to social situations. A lot skills that make up this collective and many developing the moment your baby opens their eyes and see your face (Aww). It’s not until they enter their school years where cognitive struggles start to arise, like recalling info, adapting to changes, or having self-control. So how do we know what’s typical, what isn’t, and how to help? Well, let’s break it down by age.

Executive functioning is essentially an umbrella term involving cognitive control, and it can be divvied up into three main areas: working memory, cognitive flexibility (aka flexible thinking), and inhibitory (or impulse) control.

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Growing the Executive Branch, Pt. 1: Experiences and Executive Functions

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

If you have ever witnessed your child work through a problem, wait for a reward, or make plans for an upcoming event, you’re watching their executive functions in action. When they’ve easily lost their temper, forgotten what you said, or were too rigid to view a situation from another angle; that’s evidence that those mental skills are still developing. We talked about basic executive function last fall but here’s a deeper look into what makes it grow.

Executive functions refer to a set of mental skills that allow us to appropriately engage with our environment. Together, they manage our thoughts, actions, and emotions to accomplish tasks throughout the day. It’s housed in the prefrontal cortex. Although it gathers information from other parts of the brain to determine how to plan, organize, and manage situations, it is the last of the brain regions to mature. Children are not equipped with executive function skills when they are born. Instead, they develop them through quality of experiences.

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Late Bloomer: The Prefrontal Cortex

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

You ever think back on the things you did during your childhood and just ask yourself, Why? Like, what was I thinking?

Now that we’re parents, we find ourselves like a broken record, repeating instructions to our kids or cringing at their decisions and asking the same question: Why? What are you thinking?

Honestly, no one thinks as critically as an adult and for good reason: the prefrontal cortex. We’ve mentioned this brain structure and its significance in many of our previous posts, but it’s time to put a spotlight on this region and give it the credit it so genuinely deserves.

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Our Big Bounce Review

| Patti Webb

Because we loved our SlooMoo experience, Mary and I planned a slate of local Atlanta playdates to do and share on the blog every other month.

Criteria: The playdates need to be a something new that the kids have never done before. These would be more involved activities than the standard meet-up-at-the-park and would have some sort of sensory/development function.

For February, we bought tickets to The Big Bounce America. Advertised as the world’s biggest bounce house, we bought tickets for their opening weekend here in Atlanta. Tickets are for 3-hour sessions with timed entry into the main bounce house. This was also a junior session, geared for kids 7 and younger.

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