Our blogs are inspired by our passion for enhancing childhood development and pediatric physical therapy. We write for both parents and professionals and work to provide a mix of education, activity/treatment ideas, and our favorite toys. Because we write for you, we would love to know what topics you are interested in or what questions you have that we can answer!
Ways to Prevent Torticollis
We have highlighted the 5 common signs of Torticollis. To recap, those are as follows: Always looking in the same direction Head tilting Feeding difficulties Flattening of the head Facial asymmetry As stated in that post, torticollis has become more prevalent with babies spending more time on their backs. But there are things you can do to help […]
How to Practice Bike Riding Without a Bike
We have definitely been in a rainy season recently, and we are not complaining about this, especially with all the snow that has been falling in the mountains! That being said, the rain makes it difficult to practice skills like bike riding, that are easier to do outside. So, we decided to get creative. Bike […]
Maintaining Supination for Underhand Activities
I know we recently talked about practicing underhand throwing, and as a result, as we were working on the skill with one of our kids recently, we realized that they knew what they were supposed to do but they weren’t able to maintain their arm in a supinated (palm up) position as they went into […]
Helping New Walkers Find Stability
We have done a lot of posts recently on core strength for stability. Here is one for standing and here is one for sitting! These are always somewhat ‘easier’ when a child is older and can easily follow directions. However if you read our last post, we talked about the need for stability with kids […]
Core Strength and New Walkers
When kids first learn to walk, they aren’t steady or confident in their motor skills and balance (not that they know this, but their bodies do) and they need ways to control all the joints. They will often lock out joints to control degrees of freedom so there are less things moving that they have […]
Practicing Underhand Throwing
We recently talked about how to work on and practice overhand throwing with kids, and how to work on catching. Now we are going to talk about underhand throwing. A lot of the same principles that we talked about in the above two posts work in terms of cueing and how to progress or breakdown […]
Gait Analysis
We were recently asked to talk about how we do gait analysis for kids with neuromuscular challenges such as cerebral palsy. We have a few things that we do depending on what we are trying to find out. For this post I will talk about our go to method. Our main method of doing gait […]
Skipping
Skipping is a skill that can be very common amongst kids. But, it can be a skill that is hard to teach. The child needs to have coordination and strength and balance to name a few things. A lot of times when we ask a child to skip they will go straight into galloping (we […]
Galloping
Galloping and skipping are two activities that kids will often do when they are playing. We’re going to talk a little bit about galloping today. When it comes to teaching kids how to gallop, we will try to break it down into steps with cueing and then slowly remove cues and add the steps together. […]
Practicing Throwing Overhand
Last week we talked about practicing catching in this post! Some of the same ideas are going to be applicable. You want to consider what ball you are asking the child to throw with. You are also going to want to consider the distance you are starting out at. In addition, underhand and […]