child development

Actions are Louder Than Words: The Speech and Movement Connection

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Talking doesn’t start at the mouth. Before we can speak or give meaning to language, we must learn to move.

Movement is necessary to explore our surroundings and travel from point A to point B (even if it is just to the couch). Motor development relies on the teamwork of the tactile (touch), proprioceptive (body awareness), and vestibular (movement) systems to establish a physical awareness of self to feel safe and move without fear.

Research has shown that achieving motor milestones may also be closely linked to unlocking cognitive abilities, like speech and language.

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Course Notes: The Auditory System

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Hey, are you listening to me? Did you hear what I said? What did I say?

Sound familiar? As parents, we want to believe our kids are paying attention to the things we say. Sometimes they do, but other times it feels like it goes through one ear and out the other. Although we have talked in depth how attention can play a role in why your child may not be listening to instruction, another thing to consider is that the system frequently used could often be abused.

What is the Auditory System?

This system is responsible for our ability to hear and make sense of the sounds around us. Hearing is a basic skill and one of the first to develop in the womb, working in tandem with the vestibular system to assist in movement, balance, and coordination.

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child(ish) Q&A: Speech Language Pathology

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

This spring, when we were planning this series, we wanted to get talking with a couple of our friends. We have mom friends and girlfriends, and we talk about our kids a lot. However, we don’t usually get to have professional conversations about their development. Enter our close friend Sarah, a licensed Speech Language Pathologist (SLP). Gotta love our super-accomplished Millennial Mom circle!

Before we start on our Course Notes series on the Auditory system, we gave her a few basic questions on speech that we were curious about.

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Child(ish) Reads: Thirty Million Words

| Patti Webb

This book appeared on my radar earlier this year. Author Dana Suskind, M.D. just came out with a new title, Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child’s Potential, Fulfilling Society’s Promise, and this was one of her previous books listed in her bio. Thirty Million Words was available from my library, so I gave it a try on a work trip in April.

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More Than Meets the Eye: Visual Perception

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

We are visual beings.

How we assess our environment, learn new skills, or consume entertainment is primarily through our eyes. We rely on our visual system so heavily that many times we don’t need our additional senses (touch, taste, hear or smell our surroundings) to know what’s going on.

So, if our kids overlook important visual details (like putting on a matching pair of socks), or can’t recall what they saw (“Where did you put your backpack?”), or have trouble discriminating between numbers and letters, it can be very concerning to us as parents. About 75% of classroom activities rely on the visual system.

In our throwback post, we learned that visual perception is the total process responsible for receiving and interpreting what we see. It involves visual-receptive (how our eyes move and focus on an object) and visual-cognitive components (how we interpret visual information).

When your child’s visual processing is compromised, we’re quick to assume that they need glasses/contacts or other visual aids. Although that may be the case, other factors can play a role as to why they’re seeing things differently.

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