School’s been out for summer and now, so is your kid’s schedule.
For those couple months of warm weather, kids are engaged with family vacations and camps, but there is still a lot of down time. Although everyone deserves a well-earned break, it can be difficult for kids to get back into the swing of things, especially when their new school year is just around the corner. It’s not entirely their fault though. The summer can dysregulate our children without even trying.
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About a year ago, I posted a TikTok video of my 18-month-old daughter toe-walking. For the record, every toddler (for the most part) will experiment with tiptoeing. If it is infrequent and they’re under the age of 3, there’s no need to worry.
Shortly after the video posted, multiple comments came along the lines of “You need to get her checked. She might have autism.” Side note: she doesn’t.
Although I know their concerns were well-intended, their rationale seemed ill-informed. While frequent toe-walking may be a sign of developmental issues, other delays or difficulties must be present to determine such a diagnosis. But if you Google toe-walking, autism is in the top 3 search suggestions. No wonder parents get nervous when their kid starts walking on their tiptoes.
Continue readingPlanning these playdates for review has proven to be a bit more challenging. While we love an easy afternoon at the splash pad or hanging out at our homes, this is an OT-forward blog and we love new experiences.
I was especially hyped for this playdate at Treetop Quest in Gwinnett, GA.
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On the banner for our site, you’ll see the tagline, “Turning your child’s potential kinetic.“
Every company and organization has a mission and vision statement, but this phrase has been significant to my professional career long before Child(ish) Advice came to be.
Seeing Potential
As an OT, I recognize that everyone is born with the potential to do or be something great. When it came to the kids I’d see in the clinic, their potential would get stuck, perhaps by their own limited abilities, the environment, or the presented task. This affected their participation at school, home, or within their community. They would be labeled as “bad”, “disruptive”, or “difficult”; identifiers that lowered the expectation of these kids to do anything right.
What sucked was that some of these kids believed these descriptions and that their parents were at a loss for what to do. What potential did these kids have if they didn’t think they had any in the first place? How could they harness it if they didn’t know how?
That’s when my professional mission statement was born: “Turning a child’s potential kinetic.”
It’s time for another playdate review. This month, we chose the Georgia Renaissance Festival. Both Mary and I have gone to RenFaires in the past and we each took our children last year. But for this year and this blog series, we decided to make it a full-on playdate.
Same review rules apply: The playdates need to be something new that the kids have never done before. In this case, it was a full day out with another kid. True, our kids have been to this location before, but this is not a family trip. Subtle difference there. Also, the faire had more involved activities than the standard meet-up-at-the-park and had multiple applications of sensory/development function.
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