We are just starting two months of what can be a nightmare of parents of a child with sensory issues.

Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, and New Year’s are filled with sensory issues. Bright lights, sounds, textures, colors, busy stores, and many other things can cause your child with sensory issues to have meltdowns or struggle this time of year.

There are holiday programs in schools and churches which can irritate a sensitive child’s ears. Wearing fancier clothing for parties, or costumes for Halloween can be a nightmare. Factor in all the... more

Should your special needs child have a sensory diet? Is a sensory diet anything like a gluten free diet? Will it add hundreds of extra dollars to the grocery bill each month? Actually, a sensory diet has nothing to do with food at all. So don’t head over to the natural food store yet, save your gas. It is an exercise, activity, and play program designed for an individual child with sensory processing issues. The Sensory Diet is usually designed by your child’s occupational therapist for homework between therapy sessions. Having the child practice daily, instead of just during... more

The Sensory Processing Disorder Answer Book gives practical answers to the top 250 questions parents ask. Written by Tara Delaney, MS, OTR/L and published by Sourcebooks, Incorporated of Naperville, Illinois. Tara is a pediatric occupational therapist specializing in helping children with sensory processing disorder (SPD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She also adopted a child internationally from China who came home with sensory processing issues.

True the covers says, “answers to the top 250 questions... more

We have all heard about the dangers of using a cell phone while driving a car. Some metropolitan areas have made it illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving because of the many related accidents. Last week I wrote a blog on the dangers of brain tumors associated with cell phone use. Researchers are concerned about the long-term effects on developing children’s brains if adults are showing tumors within 10 years of cell phone use. Now we have another warning for our children regarding cell phone usage. Researchers have found that children may not be able to cross the... more

The last time that LuLu went to speech therapy provided by the public school she was in kindergarten. (When I said that to this speech therapist today, she was truly blown away, and just kept asking “why did they stop?”) Now here we are six years later, and today we went for her first speech therapy session through the virtual academy. Even though she’s been enrolled since November, it has taken the school awhile locate and contract with private providers.

Now a gun-shy mom like myself, who has been extremely burned by public schools could have gotten a bit nervous... more

“The dog is driving me crazy!” LuLu exclaimed during her grammar test last week. I was puzzled what she meant, since the dog was all the way across the room, chewing on her bone. But the sound of the dog’s teeth scraping across the bone was distracting to LuLu.

I’ve noticed, since being so attuned to LuLu’s sensitivity to noise, and the way she’s unable to stop her emotional escalation when noise is a trigger, that I, too, am irritated by noise.

As life goes on here, and Mom lives with many more stressors than I had a decade ago, I realize that noisy... more

Does your adopted child have difficulty in school, with relationships, and processing information? Have you ever wondered if your child may have been exposed to alcohol while in utero, but thought there was no way to ever know for sure? Some children have facial features that indicate fetal alcohol exposure. Some of these indicating features are small eyes, low-set ears, or lack of a groove between the upper lip and nose to name a few. For children without these features we could only guess about fetal alcohol effect if we did not have contact with birth family. Now Researchers... more

I’m convinced that adoptive parents have to be some of the most dedicated folks in the world. Reading about how some have converted rooms in their homes to “sensory rooms” is further evidence. Adopted children coming from a background of neglect, often have sensory integration problems. While sensory integration problems can occur for many reasons, the probability increases for children who were not properly stimulated as infants.

As the professionals learn more, they are discovering fascinating things about the role of our vestibular system in brain development... more

As I listened to Cindy Perkins, the insightful school counselor from Maine who presented on P.L.A.C.E. at the ATTACh conference last week, it occurred to me – many Occupational Therapists are clueless.

Ok, perhaps they are not clueless…but as Cindy detailed the interventions and tools that she uses and encourages the classroom teachers to use for children exhibiting behavior problems (often a result of their trauma and anxiety), most were sensory-related.

Cindy’s school actually... more

Psychologists who treat children with trauma and some of the “combo” disorders we see in adopted children frequently tell parents that their child might benefit from a sensory integration evaluation and some sensory integration therapy.

Concerned parents start down the path of looking into this and inevitably find out that school systems provide Occupational Therapy (OT) services to children who qualify. But these parents often find that what they thought they were getting through the school-provided OT services and what their child actually needs aren’t necessarily the... more