What is OT?
Occupational Therapy focuses on the child's "occupation", which includes the developmental tasks that are required of a specific age group with respect to upper extremity functioning (overall hand movements) and skills for play.

Area of Focus for Assessment
Pediatric occupational therapists are concerned with analyzing your child's ability to perform in everyday contexts.  The goals are to improve the child's functional performance, that is the performance of daily life activities such as eating by themselves, wearing their clothes etc, and to enhance the child's ability to interact within his or her physical and social environments.

An occupational therapist helps families, teachers and caregivers of children with developmental disabilities in adapting the surroundings of the child, identifying materials that can be used by the child as well as adapting certain interaction styles that may help improve a child's overall skills.

Ongoing Care/ Therapy
The following is a brief description of some skill areas targeted during therapy:   

Fine Motor Skills: Skills related to the small muscles of the body, particularly those of the hands.  Children need adequate dexterity (fine hand movements), strength and coordination to manage a variety of tools and objects in their daily routines such as writing, eating, shoe-lacing, and buttoning.

Sensory Integration: The organization of sensory input for use.  The "use" may be a perception of the body or the world, an adaptive response, or a learning process.  Through sensory integration, the many parts of the nervous system work together so that a child can interact with the environment effectively and experience appropriate satisfaction. For example, if a child is experiencing problems with certain materials and textures, sensory integration can be used to build up tactile tolerance.   

Cognition and Problem Solving: Cognitive ability is required to learn skills in all performance areas including, self-care, play and school.  These skills underlie the child's ability to perceive, attend to, and learn from the environment. For example, for tasks such as buttoning, the child needs to know certain directional concepts such as `into' and `from'.   

Social Skills: These skills refer to the child's ability to interact with others, to cope with new or difficult situations and to manage his or her behaviors in socially appropriate ways.  Social skills influence the child's ability to establish friendships and other social relationships. For example, to build a child's social skills, the occupational therapist may often engage the child in group therapy.   

Visual Perception: The process responsible for the reception and cognition of visual stimuli.  Visual perception allows a child to make accurate judgments of the size, configuration and spatial relationships of objects. Example, with respect to writing, the child would need to know which side the curve goes for different letters such as `b' or `d'.   

Visual Motor Skills: These skills are the integration of visual perception and fine/gross motor skill, like running, cycling, and throwing a ball.  Children who have difficulty with visual motor skills will often have trouble learning how to print or write, as they have difficulty copying information. For example, they may have problems with respect to inter-word or intra-word distances - the distance between different letters in a word or the distance between different words in a sentence.