Recognizing Your Child’s Sensory Needs
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Today over on Periscope I shared about recognizing your child's sensory needs and gave some ideas on what we are doing in our home for our own kids.
I focused on my 3-year-old mainly for this topic, I actually completely forgot to include the baby, haha. I had planned to and then it just slipped my mind. You can watch the replay on YouTube below (it is about 15 minutes long).
**Note, my husband was sending me texts and so my phone cuts out a few times during the video. Not too much was missed though and I will make sure everything is included below.
#SensorySunday Periscope Episode #1 Show Notes
- What are the 8 Sensory Systems?
- Sensory Activities for Kids (all the activities I have shared here on the blog)
- 6 Activities for Children Who Jump and Climb (vestibular and proprioceptive systems, which is my daughter to a tee!)
- Ark Therapeutics (this is the part that cut out in the video, you see a brief shot of one of their chews).
- Mini Trampoline (this is the one we have in our home)
Heather Greutman, COTA
Heather Greutman is a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant with experience in school-based OT services for preschool through high school. She uses her background to share child development tips, tools, and strategies for parents, educators, and therapists. She is the author of many ebooks including The Basics of Fine Motor Skills, and Basics of Pre-Writing Skills, and co-author of Sensory Processing Explained: A Handbook for Parents and Educators.
I wanted to make paentrs aware that there is a likelihood of misdiagnosis with this disorder. My son presented in three year old kinder with a range of issues the most pressing being his inability to manage multiple directions and therefore a short term memory problem. I went to my G.P. as a result of feedback from his kinder teacher and was put in touch with a pediatrician. After asking me to fill out an intricate survey she asked when I would like to start him on Ritalin as he had ADD. The diagnosis did not feel right in my guts and I am glad I believed in my parental instinct. I was one of the lucky ones in that another parent with a child with similar issues put me in touch with a great Occupational Therapist who specialised in children with these issues. The lights went on and we worked intensively with the OC for many years. My son is now in year nine and today when I dropped him at school I knew he was exhausted from simply doing life. He is always exhausted at the end of each term but he is coping.I have had people close to me saying that he has Asbergers but what he has does not include the inability to process emotions like we all do it is more a slowness to respond to all stimuli including other people’s emotions. He is empathetic but does need help in managing his meltdowns which have intensified now he is hormonal. He is a wonderful person who has managed to survive the embarrassment of being hopeless at sport in a society that glorifies it. We celebrate who he is because he is a great human being who simply needed help to understand the world and his responses to it which were different to other people’s at times. I am glad that we didn’t let other’s including professionals label him. I have to admit though I now say he has a sensory disorder as this hits the mark completely. I am glad that there is a support group for families coming to terms with the issues involved in this area and would be happy to assist in any way I can. Thank-you for this site.