Can Therapy Be Fun?

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I assume as a parent of a child with special needs you already know about the importance of gross motor skill development for helping just about any and every developmental issue your child may have.  Perhaps you know it by different references, such as physical or occupational therapy for improving basic body skills and coordination, or strengthening neuromuscular pathways, or stimulating neurodevelopmental programs.  In the end, it means some kind of regular therapy program, often once or twice a week with a trained therapist and then daily interventions on your part to maintain progress.

If we are super diligent, we regularly get out our therapy ball, or whatever tool applies to our program, and inform little John that it’s time for therapy again.  “Oh, isn’t this fun!”  we say, while groaning inside hoping he will comply and we will have something to report to the therapist tomorrow.  If we are like most overwhelmed parents with children with special needs, we attempt our home program once or twice outside of therapy sessions, find we are too tired to fake the enthusiasm we are supposed to use for encouraging participation, and secretly admit that we were doing great just to get them to therapy only twenty minutes late this week.  We resolve to do better next week but looking at the schedule, we may begin to resent the numerous entries that refer to yet another type of therapy.

Enough already!  Can’t he just be a kid?  Well, no; not really since he still isn’t potty trained at 7 and cannot speak.  So, we grit our teeth and keep at it, trying not to feel like we are not doing enough for our child.

I’ll share with you this thought:

“What if I spent as much time playing with my child as I did stressing about not getting the therapy done?”

So, I get down on the floor, crawl around while pushing the toy car, and notice he’s immediately participating.  I push the car back and forth and realize this looks like something similar to an exercise (cube position with arm extended, see video demo of this exercise below).

I hand him the car with way too much expectation and he immediately catches on that this is a trick to do therapy.  Ok, forget the therapy, let’s just push the car.  Soon, he wants the car and is approximating the movements.  I drive the car up the side of the bed (I am now kneeling) and back down.  He follows, moving to a kneeling position, and back to hands and knees.  We race up to the top of the “mountain” standing and reaching as high as I can go.  Ok, he doesn’t follow that one but…maybe we can just play.

Our brains already have a program for developing gross motor skills.  We just need to tap into that built-in pathway.  For many children with special needs, the motor program has been interrupted or damaged.  This doesn’t mean we should give up, it just means we have to increase the variety and repetition of movements so that more information makes it through the neurodevelopmental process.

If we engage in physical play while introducing many different movements, there is greater chance of making the brain-body connections our child needs.  Family Time Fitness has a program for improving gross motor skills with over 200 different exercises and 260 different lesson plans.  My child with Down’s Syndrome cannot do a full lesson, but he can mimic many of the individual exercises during play.