When it comes to caring for your loved one who has difficulties maintaining their self-regulation, there is a lot to consider, right? Especially, to choose which is best for them in terms of environment, people, and much more. So actually, we’re on a mission to limit your challenges as a parent to direct your child toward a big future. So, in this part, we’re going to speak about Occupational Therapy (whether you’ve to consider it and whether it’s best for your child) and define how Occupation Therapy improves Fine Motor Skills.
Blog Abstract: This blog is defined by the Occupation Therapist from Empower Therapy Life Skills Clinic with the clear objectives of Occupational Therapy, literally the benefits and how it improves the Fine Motor Skills of a child. This clearly explains, “Rest assured, you’re in good hands”, and we hope you can find fulfillment in exploring our blog.
Actually, we don’t know what you guys are thinking, but we definitely take it for granted for Hands! Basically, hands are everything to everyone in their life. We can create with our hands, clean with our hands, and provide encouraging touches with our hands. The point is that our hands are versatile, functional, and amazing tools utilized daily.
Fine Motor Skills Milestones #1: Strength
The first fine motor ability we’ll discuss is fine motor strength, which is our capacity to produce the proper amount of force in our hands to carry out a useful task. In order to complete essential tasks, such as squeezing toothpaste from a toothbrush, gripping a zipper, grasping a jar lid, connecting Legos, and steadily holding onto a writing instrument, among many other things, we need strong hands. Can you list several daily activities in which you or a family member uses your hand strength?
With that said, it’s important to generate just the right amount of force to accomplish a functional task, defined as the gradation of force. For instance, you would likely want to use your hand strength to the fullest extent possible if you were squeezing lemons to make lemonade. To save energy and give the object you’re writing or drawing just the right amount of touch, you should avoid pressing down too firmly when drawing or writing.
Fine Motor Skills Milestones#2: Precision
The second fine motor ability we’ll discuss is fine motor precision, which is the capacity of the hands to coordinate an effective and targeted hand movement with a specific aim in mind. Our daily tasks require fine motor precision, such as buttoning a shirt, putting on earrings, writing words directly on a line, stabbing a little piece of food with a fork, etc. When you combine finger agility with time, you get another crucial component of manual dexterity: the capacity to successfully carry out a swift, accurate, and coordinated movement with your hands.
Occupational Therapists undoubtedly assist children with feeding, by enhancing their coordination and ability to chew food, generate a bolus, and swallow safely. Children who struggle with their oral motor muscles, have poor oral motor awareness, or have trouble with the feeding sequence, might be referred to Occupational Therapy, where we will jointly work on the fundamental abilities required for success.
It’s vital to understand that even children who are psychologically open to trying new foods, may suffer from strong aversions to even the visual presentation of food, since they may have gone through a traumatic feeding experience as infants. Therefore, the brain and body can take control and have a physiological response that may alert the youngster that this is not a safe experience, even if their minds are willing.
The prefrontal cortex is where executive functioning and its variety of skills are developed, and these abilities are crucial to our growth. Executive function is constantly developing and does not actually reach maturity in females until ages 22–23, and in males at ages 24–25.
Executive functioning comprises the following skills
Occupational Therapists work with your kid on all of these critical executive functioning abilities to promote the continued development of their executive functioning. In an Occupational Therapy session, how may this appear? To help your child develop better self-awareness regarding their regulation, we can concentrate on assisting them in identifying how their “engine” is now functioning.
Afterward, you might teach your child suitable sensory-based re-regulation techniques. We might focus on flexibility, so your child can step outside their comfort zone and try something new. We might encourage your kid to work with us to schedule the session and keep track of how much time each activity takes.
1. Peeling & Placing Stickers
Stickers can be placed on a child’s hands or clothing, and then they can peel them off. As an added challenge, draw open circles on paper, to give your youngster goals to place the stickers in. Peeling stickers requires a hold similar to the pincer grasp used to manipulate buttons. The visual motor coordination needed to insert the button into a hole is similar to the visual motor coordination needed to place the sticker inside a target.
2. Stringing Cheerios
Start by stringing Cheerios across something, such as a pipe cleaner or a piece of uncooked spaghetti, that retains its shape. Use a string to move this activity along. The ability to use two hands to perform two activities at once and the visual-motor coordination needed to thread the lace through the hole, are prerequisite abilities for pinning a zipper and pulling the slider up the chain.
3. Placing a Coin in a Piggy Bank
As with buttoning, picking up the coins develops the use of a pincer grasp, and placing them in the bank’s slot calls for visual-motor coordination. Increase the difficulty by sorting and stacking the coins first. This will call for a precise hold around the coin’s edges and visual perception abilities to recognize matches based on size. This is comparable to locating and placing the cap on the water bottle or toothpaste tube.
