In this episode, Lauren Edmunds explains that sending a child to a single weekly therapy session is like doing ten sit-ups on a Friday and expecting a six-pack. She suggests that for therapy to actually “pay off,” parents need to view the therapist like a personal trainer; the real results come from doing the exercises at home between sessions. While some tasks like colouring or household chores might seem trivial, Lauren points out that they build the foundational physical skills, like crossing the midline, required for higher-level learning like reading and writing.
To get the most out of this process, Lauren encourages parents to move past the jargon by asking therapists exactly how each activity helps. By incorporating movement, such as climbing trees, swimming, or even helping with the groceries, into daily life, parents help strengthen the brain-body connection in children. Ultimately, these everyday actions provide the “practice” where development actually occurs, making the work done in the therapist’s office far more effective.
Transcription: Making Therapy Work: Beyond the Weekly Session
When Parents Cannot See Progress
I want to talk a little bit about therapy and the impact it can have on your child and how to process it and work with therapists.
I see many parents come and see me and they’ll say that their child has been in therapy for over two years and often they say they can’t see a difference. And that is definitely sometimes the case.
So let’s talk a bit about what therapy means and how we can lean into it and how we can get the most out of it. The thing that I always say first is sending your child to 45 or an hour one session of therapy a week is like you and I doing 10 setups on a Friday and expecting a six pack. It’s just not going to happen.
Therapy is like you going to the gym with a personal trainer, but you’re going to need to do the exercises outside of that interaction as well in order to gain the benefits. If you want to extend or get more bang for your back when it comes to therapy, you have to do the work that the therapist is asking you to do.
When my child was young and now we’re talking over 15 years ago, the therapist gave me a page to colour in and said, here do this.
I just threw it away because I thought this was ridiculous. I’m paying a whole lot of money for therapy and she wants me to get my kid to colour in. I didn’t understand it.
Now therapists are explaining to parents what the colouring in will do, how it will exacerbate the learning and the development of your child’s abilities.
Building Therapy Into Daily Life
When your OT gives you homework, try to build it into the day every single day as much as possible. I like to give the advice that you want to build it into something else.
So you want to maybe get your kid to do chores around the house because sweeping is heavy muscle work, it’s proprioception, which is regulating, it’s crossing the midline, which is something children need in order to be able to read.
From left to right, in order to be able to write from left to right, in order to be able to cut bilateral integration. So those things are the practice. It’s like going home and doing the 10 setups that your personal trainer has asked you to do. And then when you get to the gym with your personal trainer, he asks you to do 50.
But you still have to do the 10 because it builds up, it builds your ability.
I first want to say, whatever your therapist is asking you to do, do it and do it as many times as possible. When I started school, I decided to implement therapy.
As a school, we don’t include therapy in our fees, but we do the work the therapist asks us to do. So we do chores, we do extra colouring in, we do integrative work, we do anything that the therapist, and I’m talking specifically OT now, it could be speech therapy things, anything that the therapist is asking us to work on with the child, because practice is where the development occurs.
Ask Questions and Participate in Life
So when your child goes to therapy, you want to understand why. You want to understand what they’re working on. You want to ask them about the jargon and what it means. If you have, you want to ask.
And then you want to say, what can I do at home?
And they’re going to say something you might want to brush off, like get them to do chores, set the table, do the dishes, wash windows, carry the groceries in from the car, and participate in life.
Because that participation is where the strength gets built a little bit every single day.
Strengthening the Tree
You’re not trying to build the apples in the tree, trying to strengthen the trees so that the apples can come for themselves. The apples are reading, doing mathematics, getting good marks in school, and showing self-discipline.
So OT in speech therapy and any kind of therapist your child is seeing, any kind of therapy they’re in is made more effective when you do the application of that in between the therapy sessions. That’s my best advice for you.
What therapists are trying to do is they’re trying to build the foundational pathways to those apples, to the reading and to the math. So they’re not working on math and reading.
They’re working on the foundational skills that are not yet in place that are necessary in order to get the higher-order skills that you’re wanting them to get at school or on the sports field.
If you feel like OT has not been working for your child, you could consider whether it’s the right OT? Is your child actively participating in the therapy? Or are they dismissive of it? Are you dismissive of it? And how are you implementing that work into your home life?
Are they swimming enough? Are they climbing trees? Are they playing sports? Are they moving their bodies? Or are they sitting on a couch, you know, playing on their screens? Because that will just undo the work that the therapist is doing.
And we want, especially for children under 14, to have them doing as much movement and activity as possible, because the body informs the brain, and then the brain can connect back to the body.
So the more they move, the more those synapses, those movement learning synapses occur, and their brain gets stronger, gets more capable. That’s how you make the most out of therapy. So listen to your therapist, do some research, get your kids involved in life and do the practice they’re asking you to do.
It will really pay off.
