Teacher Tom’s Podcast – Episode 7
Rethinking “Normal” in Child Development (Kelsie Olds)
Kelsie Olds: For me, play is almost the vehicle by which the therapy is happening, because I think that play is the primary occupation of childhood. And so when the kids come into my therapy room, they are driving the session. They have free rein to gravitate towards what in my environment is interesting to them.
Teacher Tom Hobson: Hi, it’s Teacher Tom, and welcome to my podcast, where we take place seriously. Today, I’m talking with Kelsie Olds. Kelsie is an occupational therapist, working with the children of families stationed at an air force base in the UK. But she’s more widely known, especially on Facebook, as the occuplaytional therapist. That’s right, occuplaytional therapist. I know that when I first started teaching, I had no idea what an occupational therapist is, and I think there’s a lot of us out there who are confused by what they do.
In this episode, I thought it would be interesting to talk with Kelsie about the work of an occupational therapist, especially one who grounds her work in play. She’s a thoughtful, innovative, and energetic advocate for a trauma informed, neurodiversity affirming, child led play approach to therapy.
Hi, Kelsie. Welcome to the show.
Kelsie: Hi. I’m super excited about getting to talk to you.
Teacher Tom: We had a little trouble getting scheduled just because we’re all on the opposite sides of the world here.
Kelsie: Absolutely.
Teacher Tom: You work in the UK, right?
Kelsie: Yes, I’m an American, but I am living in England, and I work on a US Air force base here.
Teacher Tom: Oh, nice. All right, well, I got to tell you, I’ve been introduced to you through your incredible and very verbose presence on social media, and I’m just so excited about what I read from you and what you’re up to and the things you’re doing. And over the course of my career, I have worked with a number of occupational therapists, both kind of through my school, but also because parents will have engaged in occupational therapists to work with their kids. But I guess what I want to ask, and I think maybe the burning question is, what exactly does an OT do?
Kelsie: That’s a fair question. It’s probably the number one question that OTs get. And the first assignment that I had in grad school was to develop an elevator pitch that I could use to explain my own profession. So most people hear the word occupation, and they think of your job, and so they’re confused about why an occupational therapist would be working with a child who doesn’t have a job, or they think it’s coming from the angle of, like, we’re supposed to make them ready for the workforce or something like that. It’s nothing like that. The root of the word occupation goes back to like occupy. Like anything that occupies your time is what I say.
So if it’s play, that’s big one for me. If it’s work, if it’s school, if it’s the stuff that you do to take care of yourself every day, and at whatever level along the lifespan that the occupational therapist is working with that person, then an occupational therapist will take whatever it is that occupies a person’s time. It could be like rehabilitation; it could be maintenance. It could be whatever it is to work on that, whatever it is that they need to do with their life, which is a very broad sounding definition, and that’s kind of like the definition from theory.
And then, in practice, when you talk about an OT working with children, they’re usually addressing either something difficult about fine motor skills or something difficult about sensory processing are kind of our two biggest realms that we work with, but they’re not the only ones. And so it’s a very broad field with a very big scope. And that means that I get the chance to be pretty holistic, which is good.
Teacher Tom: Well, that’s awesome. I haven’t heard it described that way. I’ve always worked with OTs in the context of preschool, like young children, and sensory processing is obviously one of the big areas that we work with kids and neurodiversity and all of that type of stuff. So I know that’s an area in which you are profoundly interested and professional about. But you call yourself an occuplaytional therapist or the occuplaytional therapist.
Kelsie: Very prideful of me in retrospect, as if I’m the only one. That wasn’t my intention by any means. I named myself the occuplaytional therapist because I practice occupational therapy with a child led play-based lens or framework through which I do therapy. So it’s not the way that I was trained, and it’s not necessarily like every OT in the world approaches therapy this way or has the same views on play that I do. But for me, play is almost the vehicle by which the therapy is happening, because I think that play is the primary occupation of childhood.
And so when the kids come into my therapy room, they are driving the session. They have free reign to gravitate towards what in my environment is interesting to them and play the way that they play. And I will follow along and sometimes make suggestions, sometimes model things I would like them to pick up on. And I’ve always got stuff going in my brain about how to tie it back to what it is that I hope to work on or what goals we hope to accomplish. But in the end, I developed their written goals with a team of adults, and I figure out what they want out of their own life, in their own body that they have to live in by playing with them and by watching them play. So it’s extremely important to me.
Teacher Tom: Okay, so I got a ton of questions right now. How do people even know to contact you? What is it that maybe you’re looking for in a child or you’re concerned about in a child that would cause you to say, you know what? I need to talk to an OT.
Kelsie: Absolutely. So, for me personally, I work for the schools on the air force base. So the schools are the one who decide if an evaluation for occupational therapy would be something that they would ask my clinic for, and then I would go and do the evaluation. And the things that they would see that would make them be concerned in a school setting would be kind of in the fine motor and sensory categories. Fine motor is a little more concrete, so maybe easier to explain if the child is really struggling with handwriting or really struggling with typing at later ages.
Or it could sometimes be struggling with things like being able to manipulate fasteners. That means button or unzip or snap or unsnap your clothing, or manage the zipper on your backpack, or be able to take yourself to the toilet. If fine motor problems are impacting their ability to do things in the school setting, then that would be an appropriate time for the school to ask me to evaluate whether they need fine motor related OT. And that’s usually handwriting. That’s usually schools saying that they aren’t writing to the standard that the schools would like them to be writing at.
Teacher Tom: Right.
Kelsie: The other branch of it in schools is the sensory processing component of it. And realistically speaking, it’s usually adults being like, this child is behaving some kind of way we don’t like, and we don’t know why. And maybe it’s because of sensory question mark. We don’t really know what that means or what it is or anything about it. Can you come look at them, and see? I can either, like, recommend services if I think that there are things that I can do ongoingly that will help, or I can just recommend some accommodations or make some suggestions to the school.
And everywhere in the United States, then this is the legal requirement of your local public school district. If a school has a fine motor or a sensory concern, they have an OT. And that, like, even if they’re far away, because I worked in the states before moving here in some very, very rural districts. And so this is a legal requirement of the federal government that your kid can access these type of resources.
Teacher Tom: Okay? So, as an educator, or as a parent, for that matter, how do we know the difference between, you know, just kind of normal development and something that really needs attention?
Kelsie: If a child is less than three years old, then they would fall under the government mandated early intervention services. And I’ve also worked in EI before in the past, which is early intervention. And so the simplest answer that I can give is, if you’re in the States and you are wondering at all, just call your EI clinic. That is what they are for. I’ve seen parents, like, tear themselves apart trying to decide, you know, should I contact them? Maybe I’m taking a resource from somebody else. That’s not at all how it works. They want you to call them.
And a big, big part of early intervention services is literally just having a professional come into your house and be like, hey, your kid is okay. You’re doing a great job. You’re doing okay. Or, hey, your kid is actually really struggling with this. I can see that you’re still doing a great job with this. And maybe if you tried this other thing, that might help, too, because sometimes sensory related OT for the little littles is like, you know, they’ll be like, I cannot tell if screaming bloody murder every time that you take a bath, is that just him being, like, temperamental because he’s two, or is that, like, a bad thing?
And the kind of reassuring thing about OT, at least to me, is that most of our interventions, but I could just say suggestions are things we try, most of them are completely non-invasive, and they don’t hurt in any way. If it turns out that when your kid turns three, they stop screaming bloody murder every time they take a bath, okay. It didn’t hurt anything for you to try, you know, taking a shower or taking a bath while holding them or washing their hair in the sink. Like, nobody lost anything from that.
So I would say that anybody, if you’re a parent and you’re like, you know, I just don’t know. I don’t know if this is within the realm of normal or if this is outside the realm of normal, that’s okay. It’s not your job to have to know, and it’s absolutely okay to access the resources that are available, and the government wants you to, and the therapists there want to help you. So just, you can Google, like, your city name or your state name, early intervention services and see what you have close to you if you’re in the states and also in a lot of other countries as well.
Teacher Tom: What’s interesting, I think that, and tell me if I’m wrong about this, it seems like there may be also one of the barriers to people taking advantage of the resource of OTs might be this idea that maybe there’s a stigma to it, right? Because as advanced as we are, there’s still a stigma to seeing a therapist and all that. And they worry that, oh my God, I’ve already ruined my kid and they’re only two years old.
Kelsie: Right. Or yes. So people not knowing what OT is, people not knowing that it exists or to ask for it, people, you know, thinking that your kid’s just kind of supposed to come out a certain way. And so if you’re seeking help, then that’s a bad thing. There’s a number of barriers. You can go to that one, but you can’t go to that one. And then maybe that one has this kind of philosophy, but this other one has a philosophy you don’t agree with and it just like, it becomes a big mess.
Teacher Tom: You obviously help a lot of people just online. You know, the one thing that I really liked about what you just said was that you’re actually going in and basically just giving suggestions, giving advice, giving people some perspective. Maybe.
Kelsie: Yes.
Teacher Tom: You know, maybe in 150, 200 years ago when, when extended families tended to stay together, you had the aunts and the uncles and the grandmas and the grandpas and all those people around who could sort of say, well, you know, you were just like that kind of thing. And so I like the idea of that you’re there mainly in some ways to comfort the parent or the educator.
Kelsie: It really can be. And it’s super important out here because people don’t have any family members. They moved here with, you know, the military moved them here. They’ve got absolutely no one. And so we’re really, really just coming into parents houses and being like, you know, reassurance and that resource of just like human connection.
Teacher Tom: You mentioned one of the things that you’re talking about is, you know, you go into the homes and you go into the classrooms sometimes, too, when an educator has asked you, one of the questions I have is, you know, you’re a play-based person and I’m a play-based person. To what degree does the environment of like, school impact behavior in ways that, like, if you change the environment, the behavior goes away. Is that a factor?
Kelsie: Oh, so much. Because people say, just homeschool your kids, and I am all for homeschooling your kids, and I’m all for non-traditional schooling and I’m all for a variety of environments that work, but I also don’t want to just give up on the education system and say, well, I guess all of the children who are in public school are just screwed and will just be in a bad environment forever, and no one will ever try to work to change that. And so, yes, the environment can make a massive difference.
Even teachers within the same school, even if they have a really strict administration, one could be doing everything that they absolutely can to be developmentally informed and have appropriate expectations of the kids and, you know, give them as much leeway as they can. And another one could be having absolutely no give and making all of these demands, and it can just really, really affect how kids are responding to it. And just like it would any other human being alive of any age.
Teacher Tom: Got it. I see. I see. The area that people talk about a lot now, sort of the whole neurodiversity area. Right? We talk a lot about the people who are on the autism spectrum, and I’m probably going to misuse the terms because I know we used to call it sensory integration disorder, but I don’t know if we use the term disorder anymore. It’s strange that we have all these conditions now that we didn’t used to have.
Kelsie: Right.
Teacher Tom: How do you respond to people who think we’re making it up?
Kelsie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that there’s a lot of things that go into that. So autism is a neurotype. It’s just a type of brain, and it’s very genetic. It’s very heritable. A lot of parents find out that they’re autistic when their child is diagnosed with autism, because a lot of those parents sometimes will say either like, well, I used to do that, and it toughened me up and made me ready for the real world that nobody would accept that. Or, yes, I used to do that, and it was very hard for me that nobody would accept me, and I would like to make it different for my kid this time around, you know?
Teacher Tom: Right.
Kelsie: And so there’s this comparison that I read about how we know that being left-handed used to be stigmatized.
Teacher Tom: Oh, yeah,
Kelsie: And when students just showed tendencies of naturally being left-handed, they might be punished for it or be hurt for it or be taught or trained to use their right hand.
Teacher Tom: I specifically remember teachers correcting children for left-handed writing and making them sit at the right hand or desk.
Kelsie: Oh, gosh. And so then when we look at data from statistics of how many people used to, quote unquote, be left-handed, it looks like it was like one or 2% for a long time, and then all of a sudden, it was 10%, and then it stayed at 10%, and it still is about 10% today for autism and for other neurodivergent conditions. We thought that one in every 60 people was autistic. And then it’s like, oh, wait, now we think it’s one in every 20. Oh, now we think it’s one, and it keeps going up and up. And I think that we’ll hit a point where it’s less stigmatized or not stigmatized. That would be the ideal.
And we know things about it because the other factor is that it’s not quite as simple as being right-handed or left-handed. It’s based on diagnostic criteria that are kind of in question or being adjusted. And a lot of things that people consider to be autistic traits are more accurately distressed autistic traits.
Teacher Tom: Okay.
Kelsie: And so a happy autistic person may not look like a distressed autistic person, and so then they’re not being recognized as having the type of brain that they have because they’re not displaying traits of distress. And the traits of distress are the ones that have been used to create the diagnosis. And so there’s many, many factors that come into play here. But I believe that it’s much like handedness, where there is a percent of this naturally occurring difference in the human being population, and that percent is more or less stable over time.
And we will figure out that percent when we have had diagnostic criteria and reduce stigma for a long enough time for enough people to figure it out and know it about themselves and accurately be able to report it about themselves. And until then, it will look like we’re having a spike of new things because we can notice it more accurately. There’s less stigma around getting help, and we know different ways that it presents where we didn’t in the past.
Teacher Tom: I love that metaphor, connecting it to left handedness. And I imagine that there are many other neurotypes out there that we aren’t talking about very much or that we maybe not have even identified yet because the human brain is an amazing thing. In fact, I was reading a physicist by the name of Patrick House, and in his research, he believes that every single one of us is a unique neurotype, and there is no such thing as normal.
I find myself increasingly worried about the word normal. What about you? I mean, that word normal just is not a word that I try to almost get it out of my vocabulary because people always ask me, like, what is normal development in a child? What is normal, you know, what does a normal two-year-old do right now?
Kelsie: Yeah, I think that I tend to say things are typical. Things are close to the average. Things are happening as expected. There’s a lot of different ways that I say it, but it’s, like, a better way of describing what it is that I actually mean.
Teacher Tom: Right.
Kelsie: You know, it is typical for kids to go through a period where they experiment with lying. Like, that’s not me saying, like, so it’s fine, and everyone should lie to everyone, and no one should ever do anything about it. It’s just me saying, like, you don’t have to freak out and pathologize your kid because they’re, like, experimenting with lying, because that’s a typical way they go through a phase of development where they figure out that they can do that. That’s what they do.
Teacher Tom: Yeah. Well, have you ever worked with communities in the context where you can get the whole community behind kind of talking to their children about the behaviors and inviting the kid over for playdate so he could get more comfortable?
Kelsie: I think it would be a dream to be able to. In the schools that I work in, I have suggested to the schools that I could come and just talk about the different ways that brains are right.
Teacher Tom: Right.
Kelsie: Not like this is about Johnny, but that hasn’t been something that we’ve been able to make that work yet. The closest that I came was that I worked in a group foster home for children. It was all older children. I think the youngest was eight or nine, and the oldest was 17. And they all had such significant disabilities of some kind, including neurodivergent, including physical disabilities, including behaviors, that they couldn’t be in a traditional home. And so they were in this facility all of the time.
Some of them went to school outside. Some of them went to school inside. And so the scope of what I was doing there changed a lot over the course of my working there, because the funding changed. And I went from being able to provide individual OTs to all of the kids, to them asking me to please pick three kids and just only keep them and discharge all of the other ones, which is not even slightly how, like, need works.
Teacher Tom: Right.
Kelsie: And it was really devastating to me at the time. And so I asked if instead, if I could shift the scope of what I did to doing group activities, and any of them could come to the group if they wanted, but I would focus on the three kids, or, like, I would do activities that I thought would focus on the three kids. And they said, yes, I could do that. Some of the staff would come and, like, learn and join in and stuff, and some of them would not be able to do that. And then, you know, they’d be a different person next week, but the kids could all join in, and we could all talk about the ways that brains worked.
And that job was a stepping stone on becoming the occuplaytional therapist because I went into it with what had been modeled for me of let’s all sit down at a table and do a worksheet. And they were all like, yeah, screw you. I’m going to throw your pencil and leave the room. And so I very quickly adapted because before that, I had worked with kids who might be sitting there silently thinking, I hate this, I hate you. But they were polite enough to not say it. And these kids were like, hey, life has taken everything else from me, but I don’t have to be here, and I will leave the room.
Like, I’ve got that autonomy, if nothing else. You know, you can’t stop me. So I very quickly learned to at least be interesting enough that they would be interested in engaging, and then we could go from there. So we just talked a lot about sensory, what things felt like and what we were experiencing with our senses. And I was trying to do my best. And there were situations where really horrible, violent things would happen with one kid, you know, toward a staff member or one kid to another kid or whatever, and they would follow up on that, but then they still had to continue living in the same place.
There’s like a epidemic of little, little kids being expelled from their preschools, being barred from community settings when they’re literally three years old. Like, that’s like a black mark you carry forever. You’re already the bad kid. You go anywhere and you’re already the bad kid.
Teacher Tom: Right. And the reason I asked you this and the reason I wanted to kind of get on this topic a little bit is that I think it’s pretty clear that we become who we’re going to become through others in many ways.
Kelsie: Yeah.
Teacher Tom: And so, you know, I was thinking about your therapy room. You know, you have a kid in there, one kid. I assume you have toys in there.
Kelsie: Yeah, a bunch of stuff.
Teacher Tom: And you’re observing them, but this has happened to me quite often, working with OTs is they’ll work with a kid in their offices, and then will report different behaviors in the classroom.
Kelsie: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Teacher Tom: And they’ll say, but it doesn’t show up in the office.
Kelsie: Right.
Teacher Tom: How do you find the balance between that? I guess you obviously have to see the kid in all their different environments.
Kelsie: I want inclusion. It is an important goal to strive for, and it is what I want in schools. And the push for it in schools is a magnificently, societally important counterbalance to prior strategies of take all the kids with any problems and ship them off to a facility and never see them again. We obviously need a strong, strong steps away from that. Where I struggle is in token inclusion, or inclusion by name, but not by action, where a student is just sitting there drowning, and they might be shown up with their behavior, or they might have learned to at least be quiet and not be annoying.
You know, I could, like, legally, theoretically, I could go and do push in therapy with students in their classrooms, but push in therapy for fine motor would be I sit next to their desk and I try to make them handwrite better. I cue them to do handwriting things better, you know, or I bring my own worksheet, and we work on it at their table and push in for sensory stuff, I do do sometimes, and it’s when we have pulled out to my room, figured out a strategy that works for them, and then we go try it together and with their teacher involved and all of that.
And so I do a lot of pull out because I know that I can be this person in their life with unconditional, positive regard for them, that I can be someone who plays reciprocally with them, however it is that they play. So if they’re struggling at recess because they’re not playing well with other kids, because the other kids aren’t playing the way that they think that they could, I can be a million times more flexible than another eight-year-old can. You know, you can win every game. I won’t be a sore loser. You know, you can change the rules, and I’ll be like, wow, if I had all of the time in the world, then, yes, I would love to be sculpting communities.
And I don’t have all the time in the world. I have at most 30 minutes a week. I’m like, this is going to be the best 30 minutes of your week, man. You have to have joy and delight somewhere in school before you can start to grow it out into anywhere else in the school. A lot of times, I think that that one-on-one attention and joy and delight is more powerful than me sitting next to them and trying to help them do a worksheet because you’ve got to have sensory before you can have core strength. You’ve got to have core strength before you can have upper body strength, and you’ve got to have upper body strength before you can have fine motor skills. And most of the kids are missing huge chunks out of that foundation.
If I come up with an idea with a kid, and we make something up, and we’re making up imaginative play, and I know that the thing that we’re making up is building their strength in those areas, then I know that they might go to the playground, go home, go to their friend’s house, and teach them that game that they made up, and then they’re practicing it all over the place and all over their life as long as it’s interesting to them in a way that they wouldn’t do. If I was like, go home and do more homework, they’d be like, I mean, maybe, but I hate it, and I’m not getting anything out of it. But if it’s play, then it’s the primary occupation of their childhood.
Teacher Tom: Indeed. Okay. I used to work with parent educators, and we would always tell the parents, expect your child to be hit at some point, maybe many times. And we would also say, and expect your child to be a hitter sometimes. And you’re going to feel, as a parent, you’re going to feel horrible both ways. You know, you’re going to feel horrible that it’s happening, that your child’s involved, whether they’re the perpetrator or they’re the victim. What amount of hitting is normal? When do we really start getting concerned? I mean, and at normalcy, I just used that word because every two-year old’s going to hit at some point, right? But when does it become something that you would manifest as, you know what? We need to talk to Kelsie.
Kelsie: Well, block them. Just block them. So whenever brains learn to do an action, one brain neuron connects to another brain neuron, connects to another one, and it creates a pathway. And to some extent, the new pathways come with greater cognitive flexibility. Brain being able to think of different way to do things, that happens with maturity, that happens naturally with maturity for most children. So the reason that I say this is because I do sometimes have daycares where they’re like, yeah, well, every time we step away from him, then he whacks another kid.
And it’s like, okay, so when you need to step away, how about you say, hey, Connor, come with me. And then also sometimes, just a verbal cue will not stop a two-year-old. Like, you can’t stand 30 feet across the room and shout at a two-year-old, hey, wait, don’t hit him. And, you know, expect that to work.
Teacher Tom: They’re very predictable. The arm goes up and you can see it in slow motion coming. Just grab their little wrist and say, I can’t let you hurt people.
Kelsie: Yes, it is a little bit baffling to me when people will say, well, you know, they just hit him completely out of nowhere. And I’m like, you? You could probably see it coming. What they mean is, I have 30 kids in the room and I can’t look at him every second of the day. And I also sometimes grab their hand and say, what do you need right now? Instead of, I can’t let you hurt people. So how much hitting is too much hitting? I mean, if other kids are getting to a point where they’re like, nobody ever plays with him because he’s mean and he’s bad and he hits people. Okay, you’ve probably gone past the threshold where this was already causing significant community distress in some way.
Two-year-olds kind of instinctually have an understanding that everybody might get bonked if they’re taking things and they’re like, meh, okay, yeah, that was fair. And then they walk away, it’s probably not causing distress in some way. It feels like a lot of my job is saying, this kid is doing this for a reason and it’s a human being reason and you’re a human being, so let me reframe it for you so that you can understand it and have empathy for it. And that does a lot. I really do feel like that it does a lot for there to just be a person in this kid’s corner and saying, this is a human being. This is not some alien force that you can’t possibly comprehend what’s going on in their head, you know, that’s making them act this way or whatever. And I think that that brings a lot to humanizing kids, I guess, in a way.
Teacher Tom: Well, Kelsie, this has been fun talking to you. Where can people find out more about you and what you’re up to?
Kelsie: My main thing is my Facebook page. It’s the Occuplaytional Therapist with play in the middle there. I’ve also got a website which is just www.occuplaytional.com. I sometimes post stuff on Instagram, which is also just Occuplaytional.
Teacher Tom: Well, I asked you the questions I had in mind. Is there something I should have asked you? Is there something you’d like to leave people with as we wrap up here?
Kelsie: Please just let them play. Play is how they develop all of the things. And I actually, I love screens and I use them in lots of ways. But when it comes to fine motor development, screens are not causing fine motor development. Playing by digging, gripping, climbing, squeezing, hanging, pinching, pulling, picking, cutting, ripping, all of that is what twos and threes and fours, and I would even say fives and sixes, even though the American school system doesn’t agree with me, need to be doing with their hands in order to support the ability to write later on.
They don’t need to be tracing; they don’t need to be writing. They don’t need to be copying. They don’t need adults. Holding a kid’s hand and making them move around and then being like, look they wrote this. So never, hand over hand, ever, ever.
Teacher Tom: I take a great deal of pride in my ability to get kid, any kid, on my bandwagon. And if I can’t get them on my bandwagon, then I get on their bandwagon. And if I can’t get on theirs, I have every confidence that together, we can build a bandwagon to share. Now, I hope all early childhood educators feel this way. I love all kids, but I am particularly drawn to the kids who are quirky, even difficult. I found that most kids, most of the time, if you treat them with respect, kindness, and patience, if you treat them like people, if you stop trying to control them and instead strive to understand them, if your goal is connection and relationship, things will work out.
Over the years, however, I’ve had my confidence not shaken exactly, but challenged. Like I always say, the moment we feel like we know it all is the moment the child will show up to prove us wrong. Many years ago, we enrolled a four-year-old, I’ll call him Jerry, who had been essentially kicked out of two previous preschools for being disruptive. I was confident that we would make it work. Prior to meeting the boy, however, I asked his parents to describe his disruptive behaviors. Jerry’s father told me, you know, sometimes he makes whooping noises and flaps his hands around.
Thats disruptive? Come on, he’s four. If whooping noises and flapping hands are disruptive, then they’re all disruptive. Now, as it turned out, Jerry’s father wasn’t entirely forthcoming. We quickly learned that among the ways that Jerry was disruptive was that he would be periodically inspired to, say, suddenly grab a classmate in a tight bear hug and fall to the ground with them. He was tempted, often, to bite the arms of other children so hard and without any apparent cause that they would bleed. He would spontaneously start hurling blocks around the room.
Now, to be fair, Jerry was also charming and intelligent. But that didn’t change the fact that most of the children, and even some of the adults, were afraid of him. Now, we did what we knew how to do, right? We talked with him. We soothed him. We reminded him of the rules. We used all the tools in our regular preschool toolbox. But still he would hurt other children several times a day. As a cooperative school, his parents were actually in the classroom, as were the parents of the other children. We were a loving, tolerant community. But our days were increasingly dominated by this boy’s unpredictable behavior.
Then one day, my worst fears were realized. During one of our monthly parent meetings, we were discussing strategies and ideas for working with this boy when the parent of a child who had more than once gone home with bite marks said, maybe our school isn’t the right place for Jerry. My heart fell. We had never, never asked a family to leave our school. I braced myself for the worst. The room was silent for a moment. Then, like a miracle, one mother stood up and said, if Jerry has to leave the school, then our family is leaving.
The next few minutes were like that scene, you know, from the classic movie Spartacus when the Roman general tells the former slaves that if they don’t give up the rebel Spartacus, they would all be crucified. In the movie, the former slaves, one by one, stood up and declared, I am Spartacus. No, I am Spartacus. Except in this case, the solidarity and heroism took the form of parent after parent rising to say, if Jerry leaves, we will leave. Now, naturally, by the end of this, the boy’s parents were in tears.
In that moment, we, as a community, doubled down to help this boy and his family. Fortunately, Jerry’s family had just started working with an occupational therapist. A profession none of us had ever heard of before that moment. In partnership with this incredible professional, we learned together about the boys sensory processing challenges and some strategies and techniques that could help him. With this OT’s help, we agreed that we would each day assign an adult companion, not his own parent, but the parent, one of his classmates to stick with him throughout the day, not as a jailer, but to pay attention, to look for the signs that he was becoming overwhelmed or overstimulated and to act before things got out of hand.
The OT felt that he would benefit from after school playdates at the homes of other families. And several families stepped up. She also helped us think through how to speak with the other children about this boy and his needs. Parents agreed to explain around their dinner tables that the boy didn’t mean to hurt people but rather was reacting to lights, sounds, and other stimulation. And perhaps most powerful was the OT’s suggestions for ways we could coach the other kids to stand up for themselves when they found themselves being grabbed or hit or bitten.
It took a while, and, you know, Jerry still occasionally hurt other kids. But something fundamental began to shift. In one instance, I was too late on the scene to prevent a girl from being tackled to the ground. But instead of outrage, screaming and crying as she had previously done, she said firmly, Jerry, I don’t like that. It hurts me. We adults had often scolded Jerry, obviously, but this coming from one of his friends got through to him, and he said he was sorry.
One day Jerry asked, Wyatt, can I sit next to you? And Wyatt, a boy who had gone home with bite marks on more than one occasion, answered, sure, if you don’t hurt me, to which Jerry replied firmly, almost as if to himself, I won’t hurt you. And he didn’t. Again, things were far from perfect, but we were as a community, getting back to the kind of meaningful activities or occupations that are the focus of an occupational therapist’s work.
The American Occupational Therapy association defines an OT as someone who helps people across their lifespan participate in the things they want and or need to do through the therapeutic use of everyday activities, or, again, occupations. And in the case of our preschool, that occupation was getting back to play. I understand that there are so many things about this story that might not work or be possible in other settings, but it was transformational for me, for us. Since then, I’ve worked with dozens of OTs, and I’m always inspired by their insights and knowledge.
Things have changed, but there is still a tendency for parents and educators to resist anything that smacks of therapy, perhaps feeling like it somehow, you know, shameful or an admission of failure. But as Kelsie, the Occuplaytional Therapist tells us, no child is ever harmed by a call to your local OT. And I’m here to tell you that, man, there is a lot to gain. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kelsie, the Occuplaytional Therapist, as much as I did.
That’s it for this episode of Teacher Tom’s Podcast. Thanks for playing with me, and a great thank you to Kelsie for this thought-provoking conversation. You’ll find out more about Kelsie and her work at occuplaytional.com. And in the show notes, you’ll find more about her and the link to the website. I’m Tom Hobson, and you’ve listened to Teacher Tom’s Podcast, Taking Play Seriously. You can find out more about me teachertomsworld.com. That’s teachertomsworld.com.
Teacher Toms Podcast is a part of the Mirasee FM podcast Network, which also includes such shows as Course Lab and Just Between Coaches. Stay tuned for more fun episodes by following us on the Mirasee FM YouTube channel or your preferred podcast player. If you found today’s insights valuable, take a moment and leave us a starred review. It’ll help us reach more people like you. Again, thanks for playing with me, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.