We are contracted with most major insurance companies as well as Washington and Idaho

Are They Regulating?

Behavior

Movement can be more soothing than staying still. When a child has difficulty sensing their body in space, they often use movement as a way to feel more grounded, comfortable and secure.

Business and high energy is absolutely appropriate for children but it should also be balanced with the ability and skill of being able to be calm and still. Regulation of the system can participate in both.

Expression

The speed at which your child's emotions rise can indicate how well they manage stress hormones related to safety and threat. When emotions escalate quickly, it may suggest that their nervous system is overly sensitive to triggers, causing them to feel threatened more easily.

When the nervous system isn't properly communicating between incoming sensory stimuli and the body's response plans, the feeling of being "on edge" becomes very real. This happens because the body is in a constant state of survival mode.

Our approach focuses on strengthening the connection between the body's systems, helping them handle more stress and increasing the threshold for feeling threatened, so your child can tolerate more without becoming overwhelmed.

Coordination

The quality and coordination of your child's movements can reveal how well their nervous system processes their environment and plans responses. Signs that their system may be compensating include using excessive force to complete tasks, noticeable mouth or tongue movements during physical activities, and difficulty coordinating their arms and legs to perform different actions at the same time.

Poor coordination often indicates that the body's systems aren't working together as they should. We often hear the phrase, "They'll grow out of it," but while a child may seem less uncoordinated over time, it’s often because they self-limit activities due to difficulty or develop compensatory motor patterns to mask the challenge.

How Does Foundation's OT Help?

Reflex Integration - Body Work

Our skilled therapists teach parents and caregivers specific techniques to help integrate reflexes, which strengthen brain-body communication pathways during your child's development and throughout their life.

To support the connection of pathways that have been disrupted, we use sensory input, particularly proprioceptive input, to communicate with the nervous system. When bodywork is done, it's like a non-verbal conversation happening within your child's nervous system, being guided to communicate through appropriate developmental pathways instead of the dysregulated and compensatory pathways developed over time.

As the body is guided back to the correct brain-body pathways, the system as a whole becomes more connected and communicates with less effort. This leads to decreased stress and survival responses, improved sensory processing, and better motor responses. Ultimately, this allows your child's body systems to work together smoothly rather than despite each other's miscommunications.

Breath Regulation

The ability to breathe while engaging the low core correctly is essential for the body’s regulation. Shallow breathing, breath-holding, or avoiding breathing exercises all suggest that the body is struggling to properly organize the sensory-motor systems.

Movement

Our skilled therapists utilize exercises, obstacle courses, and play to engage your child’s body in different ways, helping to connect all the communication pathways. Throughout these activities, we will coach and guide your child through specific changes in their motor patterns, while also fostering emotional and social behaviors that promote regulation

Multi Sensory Activities

Multi sensory activities engage both sides of the brain and work on the communication between left and right brain functions. This is key for any academic and learning goals.