Since March, teletherapy has become more widely used so children and adults do not miss therapy appointments. It is not ideal to have a child sitting in front of a screen for therapy, especially because a lot of schools are on modified schedules, but it may be the only way that is available to them. Here are some tips to improve your teletherapy experience.

Make the most out of your child’s teletherapy sessions

• Use a computer or laptop, if available. A working camera and speaks are a must. Phones and tablets may be more difficult to set up and the screens, especially on a phone, may not be adequate for what the therapist is having the child view or be ideal for the therapist/child interaction.
• Download the program your child’s therapist is using and make sure to test the camera and audio before your child’s appointment.
• Do not put your child’s back against a window as this can cause glare on the computer screen and make it difficult to see your child.
• Headphones may help the child to attend to therapy tasks better, especially if they are in a noisy environment.
• A reliable internet connection is necessary as video and often sharing of the therapist’s screens and other activities occur. A quieter space, like a library, may have access to high speed internet if unavailable in the home.
• When getting ready for therapy, try to have the child set up in a comfortable and quiet place. Limit distractions, such as those that can occur in a busy kitchen, hallway, living room, etc. where people are coming and going.
• Ask your therapist ahead of time for any materials that the child may need. That way, you are not having to search for them during therapy.
• If your child is old enough they may not need you sit with them for therapy. Make sure you are close by in case the child or therapist has any questions or you need to help troubleshoot a technology problem.
• Encourage your child to have fun and do their best. Therapy isn’t always fun, and teletherapy can present its own challenges. Hopefully, between you and the therapist, you can help your child achieve their goals.

Ask questions!

Lastly, always make sure to ask questions or voice concerns to your therapist. Teletherapy can be tricky and sometimes therapy sessions do not go as planned. This happens in the clinic as well. Therapists do their best to adapt and make sure your child is still receiving quality therapy. It is a learning process for everyone! For more tips on how improve your child’s teletherapy, check out this article. And if your kids are like most and doing remote school at home, here are some ideas for activities to keep your kids busy!

The word “chores” usually brings on the moans and groans of dread, but it doesn’t have to. Age appropriate chores can benefit your child’s development. It can help prevent boredom and make family life run smoother.

Benefits of Chores

• Life skills: Helping around the house allows children to gain the confidence to do day to day tasks independently. Therefore, it takes the stress off of moms and dads to support every want and need (i.e. simple snacks, getting dressed, tidying a bedroom).
• Teamwork: Chores don’t have to be an individual activity. Allowing siblings to work together for larger tasks (i.e. dishes, laundry) shows them how to work together for a common goal.
• Time Management: Does your kiddo really want that screen time? Have them do a few days of chores first and fun after. This will likely increase their efficiency and teach them the reward of getting a task done quickly, compared to wasting time whining and fighting.
• Family Support: Starting kids out early with simple household tasks and responsibility increases the chance that your aging child will respect their role in household needs. In addition, completing a task as a family allows time for bonding, turn taking, and language emersion.

Chore Ideas by Age

Toddlers/Preschool (ages 2-4 years)

• Help make the bed
• Pick out their outfit for the day
• Feed the family pet
• Help clean up their toys and/or play spaces

Preschool/Kindergarten (ages 4-6 years)

• Clear and/or set the table
• Bring laundry to their basket or laundry room area
• Help put away groceries
• Assist in making dinner/snacks/lunches

Elementary School age (ages 6-10+ years)

• Walk the family pets
• Vacuum parts of the house
• Sweep/mop
• Take out the garbage
• Fold and/or put away their own laundry

How to Make Chores Fun

Of course, some kids are resistant to the idea of chores. This could be because of how they have approached them in the past, the amount of work they think is required, or simply because they would rather be playing. First, it is important when introducing or revamping your household chore system to make sure that the tasks you are asking your child to do are activities that they are able to be successful with. While there are opportunities to learn and teach new skills with additional chores, we don’t want these tasks to be overly difficult or frustrating. Start simple, and add later.

Secondly, many kids benefit from use of timers, reward charts, reward systems, or games. A visual timer may motivate a child to get a task done faster, a kitchen timer may motivate two siblings to complete and see who can get more chores checked off faster in ten minutes, and a sticker chart to earn screen time may motivate others. Above all, try out some options and see what works for you and your specific family.

For additional ideas, check out our Chore Infographic!

Cooking is an activity that happens in all households. While it seems like an everyday, monotonous task, it is filled with wonderful learning experiences when shared with children. Cooking with kids? The reaction from many may be, “that isn’t something I look forward to.” This is understandable. Letting kids “help” nearly always takes more time, energy, and creates bigger messes than simply doing it on your own. But, children are naturally curious and eager to do fun things. Involving your child with cooking has many benefits if you can look beyond the mess! So, exactly what are these benefits, and how do you go about including kids in the cooking process?

Cooking Encourages and Promotes Learning

• Following recipes promotes reading. Even preschool children can follow simple picture recipes or help locate ingredients by the letter/sound that it starts with.
• Measuring develops math skills. Children learn about various types and methods of measurement. Count eggs or cups of sugar as you add them to incorporate simple addition and subtraction into cooking.
• Cooking with kids is also a fun way to expand vocabulary. Describe how foods feel, look, smell, and taste.
• Explain how foods change with temperature or by adding other ingredients to incorporate science into cooking. Discuss how certain foods can help our body.
• Children learn the importance of following directions. Following a recipe from start to finish helps build the skills for planning and completing projects.

Cooking Provides Opportunities to Develop Motor Skills

Hand strength, using both hands together (or bilateral coordination), and fine motor control and coordination are integrated into cooking activities through a variety of ways.

• Squeezing pouches and piping bags, kneading dough, rolling small pieces of dough between the thumb and pointer or middle finger, and sprinkling sprinkles by using only the thumb and pointer finger all help to develop hand strength.
• By using a rolling pin, rolling food items into balls for meatballs or cookies, stirring, and opening and closing screw off or pull of lid containers, children develop bilateral skills.
• Measuring, pouring, stirring, mixing, and using cooking utensils all involve fine motor control and coordination.

Cooking with Kids Encourages Them to Try New Things

Therefore, it provides many sensory experiences which can be helpful with those hesitant or picky eaters.

• Allow children to explore food through touch. Kneading dough, rinsing vegetables, tearing lettuce, and peeling fruits involve touching foods and becoming more comfortable with them.
• Let children smell and take small licks of foods. Talk about how they look and taste.
• Having children participate in cooking and explore foods helps develop positive associations with food.

Finally, the greatest benefit of cooking with kids are the memories created. It is a way to share family traditions that have been passed down through the generations. Your child’s curiosity and eagerness to learn will help them build lifetime skills. In other words, all the mess was well worth the fun.

For ideas on what to make with your kids, Weelicious has 20 easy recipes. Likewise, make sure you check out Part 1 of Cooking with Kids to get ideas on encouraging language in the kitchen.

 

Some of my earliest childhood memories include helping my mom and dad in the kitchen. From a young age, I was standing on a stool at the stove stirring spaghetti sauce or moving hot dogs around a frying pan with a fork. Cooking with your kids and involving them in food prep is a great way to teach sequencing and increase independence. It can also expand language and encourage an interest in a variety of food, just to name a few! This is especially helpful if you have a picky eater (or eaters) on hand. I know you’re probably thinking the kitchen can be a pretty dangerous place. But, there is probably something your child could help with during every meal. This is especially true if you don’t mind a little mess here or there.

What Can Kids Do in the Kitchen?

Children as young as two can make great kitchen helpers. Are you making scrambled eggs for breakfast? They can help crack the egg with your hand over theirs to help with force and control. They can even help pick the eggshells out of the bowl, if necessary. Adding any cheese or veggies to the eggs? You chop, and your toddler can scoop the cheese or add-ins with their hands into the bowl or into a measuring cup to dump. They are also great at helping to stir! Most meal prep can be modified in some way to allow your child to help in an age appropriate way. As children get older, they can begin helping even more and can learn more advanced skills such as safe cutting/chopping, measuring, and using the stove or other appliances.

Some easy meal and snack ideas you can try when cooking with your kids (or teach them to make independently) include: making tuna fish, peanut butter and banana roll ups, grilled cheese, and no bake cookies.

How to Encourage Language When Cooking with Your Kids

When you have your kids help out making breakfast, lunch, or dinner, it’s also a great time to talk about and try the ingredients. If you are cooking with unfamiliar foods, you can talk about what they think a food might taste like. You can also talk about what foods feel like (smooth, bumpy, soft, etc.), look like, and smell like. This is a great time to help teach descriptive vocabulary too. For example, if cooking with a familiar food that your child likes and you ask, “What does it smell like?” They may respond with, “good.” Then you can give choices like, “Does it smell sweet like a marshmallow or smokey like a hamburger,” etc.

But What if My Child is a Picky Eater?

Cooking or helping with meal prep may even encourage your child to try foods they have previously resisted. Seeing individual ingredients and how things are made may make trying a new food less scary or intimidating. Meal prep may be a less stressful way for pickier eaters to interact with food without the pressure to eat it. If you have a very picky eater and you are concerned that it may not be normal, you can find more information in our Picky Eater or Problem Feeder article. Reaching out to a pediatric occupational or speech therapist may also help to provide guidance.

Do you often ask yourself, “Why does my child fall so much?” Is it normal? Do you worry that your child is going to get hurt? There are many reasons why your child could be falling. Some are typical of a child’s development and others might require intervention to correct. The leading cause of hospitalization due to injury in the United States is falls. Therefore, it is totally normal for parents to worry about falls.

Why Do Kids Fall?

Kids fall for a number of reasons. Kids who are learning how to walk fall frequently. This is completely normal, and most importantly, necessary for kids to experience. Falling is part of a child learning how to balance and learning about where their body is at in space. External hazards, such as stairs and open windows, are another reason for falls. These falls can often be prevented. For ideas on how to prevent these types of falls at home, click here. Other common reasons for falls include poor attention, curiosity, impulse control, and risk taking behavior. There are also physical causes why kids fall, which can can be improved.

Common Physical Reasons Kids Fall

Weakness causes my child to fall.

Weakness in the core or lower extremities can lead to falls. It can make activities, such as landing a jump or climbing up and down stairs, difficult. Strength can be improved by using specific exercises and activities that target the area of weakness.

Poor balance causes my child to fall.

Kids with poor balance often fall frequently. There are two types of balance, static and dynamic. Static balance is the ability to hold the body in a fixed position. For instance, poor static balance can make it hard for kids to balance on 1 leg. Dynamic balance is the ability to maintain postural control while body parts are moving. For example, poor dynamic balance can make it hard for kids to walk or run on uneven surfaces.

Visual problems cause my child to fall.

Visual problems can lead to falls. Kids with poor visual acuity might have trouble seeing obstacles or changes in walking surfaces. Glasses can improve visual acuity, therefore, decreasing falls. Vision problems can also happen when the eyes don’t work well together. A trained professional can teach specific vision exercises to improve eye teaming.

Vestibular problems cause my child to fall.

The vestibular system provides the brain with information about motion, head position, and spatial position. Recurrent ear infections are a common cause of vestibular problems. Vestibular issues can cause falls or problems with balance.

Poor coordination causes my child to fall.

Coordination refers to a child’s ability to move their arms and legs together in an effective way. This often means using both sides of the body together. One of the earliest skills that a child learns is crawling. Crawling is an excellent example of using both arms and legs successfully to move. Other examples include jumping jacks and skipping. Older children are often the ones learning these types of activities. As a result, coordination is a common reason for older children to fall.

Frequent falls can be scary for a parent, of course. Despite our best efforts, they are inevitable. However, if a physical cause is the reason for those falls, physical therapy can help. With this in mind, click here to learn how physical therapy can help answer the question, “Why does my child fall so much?” Or call (406) 388-4988 to set up an evaluation today.

Infants, toddlers, and preschoolers are growing up with increased access to technology. Let’s be honest, there are 3 year olds who can navigate an iPad better than I can! It’s common for parents to feel proud about how technologically advanced their child is. Or, to brag about how an app helped teach their child a basic concept (e.g., colors or shapes). Other parents might wonder if technology can help their child learn and which educational apps are best. But, what are the effects of all of this screen time?

I want to be clear. While technology can serve as a learning tool, interaction is fundamental. You cannot expect your child to learn as much from technology as they could from an in-person interaction. Furthermore, research explains negative impacts of screen time on children. In this article, I will explain the effects of screen time on the language development of young children, 0 to 5 years. I will also discuss how parents can identify a screen time balance for their children in a world of evolving technology.

What is Screen Time?

First off, let’s define the term. “Screen time” refers to any time that your child spends with a screen in front of their face. This includes: smart phones, tablets (e.g., iPad or Kindle), laptops, computers, television (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube), DVD players, hand-held gaming devices (e.g., Nintendo), movie theaters, and any screen with moving pictures. Regardless of whether or not the content is educational, screen time is screen time. The effects can be significant to your child’s overall development.

What are the Facts?

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), in 1970, children started to regularly watch TV by 4 years of age. Today, children begin to interact with technology as early as 4 months of age. On average, children under 2 years of age spend two hours per day using technology. So, what’s the big deal? Research shows limited educational benefit of screen time for children under 2 years of age. The AAP advises screen time guidelines for children, 0 to 5 years old:

• Children 0 to 18 months should not engage in screen time. This excludes interactive video calls supported by adults (e.g., FaceTime or Zoom).
• Children 18 to 24 months may engage in select, high-quality, interactive programs (e.g., Sesame Street).
• Children 2 to 5 years, should engage in no more than one hour of select, high-quality, interactive programs (e.g., PBS).

***Note:  For ages 18 months to 5 years, adult supervised viewing is recommended. This suggests that the child and parent share and talk about what they are watching. In doing so, parents can support their child’s interpretation and understanding of the content.

Can Screen Time Cause Language Delays?

Research published multiple studies about the negative effects of screen time on language development. One study found that children who watched more than two hours of TV before 12 months of age were six times more likely to have a language delay (Chonchaiya, W., and Pruksananonda, C., 2008). Another study found that by 18 months of age, 20% of children had a screen time average of 28 minutes daily (Birken, C., 2017). For every 30 minute increase in screen time, there was a 49% increased chance of expressive language delay.

Ultimately, research shows us that increased screen time places young children at high risk for language delay. This includes: late talking or difficulty developing language and literacy skills. A child’s first years of life are crucial to language development. This is a period of time when a child’s brain is most receptive to language. When the child ages, it becomes more difficult for them to develop new language skills.

Therefore, every moment a child spends in front of a screen means less time learning from an in-person interaction.  Screen time does not replace in-person interactions for teaching verbal and non-verbal language and communication.

What if My Child Already Has a Language Delay?

There is no way to determine if too much screen time caused your child’s language delay. A combination of factors is most likely the cause. Therefore, parents should not feel guilty or blame themselves for their child’s language delay.  However, parents should keep in mind that continued overuse may contribute to further delay. It may also prevent or slow improvement. When a child demonstrates difficulty using language, they need every opportunity to hear words spoken and to practice using language.

Other Effects of Screen Time on a Young Child’s Development

Across the first years of a child’s life, their cognitive abilities are increasing at a rapid rate. In part, due to natural development. In part, due to environment (e.g., playing with caregivers, or sharing with peers). When a child is exposed to excessive screen time, natural and environmental factors are limited. Therefore, over exposure to screen time may also result in difficulty across the following areas:

• Social-emotional development
• Coping skills or the ability to emotionally self-regulate
• Caregiver-to-child relationships
• Healthy sleep habits

Let’s Be Real

We understand that children don’t learn best from screens. We also know that too much screen time can have a negative impact on a child’s development. What does that mean for your child’s screen time? It’s common for parents to admit that using screen time while the parent takes a break or needs to get something done occurs in their home. While screen time does not promote your child’s development, occasional use can help families get through a busy day. Just remember, everything in moderation. When possible, support your child’s screen time by engaging them in the technology. Try to use technology as a tool to engage your child in language and literacy supported interactions.

For infants, screen time is not recommended. For children 2 to 5 years old, limit screen time to one hour per day of supported, high-quality programming. Preferably parents should co-view content with their children. This helps children understand content and relate it back to their surrounding world. Parents should avoid fast-paced programs or apps with distracting content. Avoid violent content. When devices or TVs are not in use, turn them off. Bedrooms, mealtimes, and playtime should remain screen free. This goes for children and their parents. Avoid use of screens one hour prior to bedtime and remove them from the bedroom at bedtime. Parents should avoid using screen time to calm their child in order to support a child’s ability to self-soothe and regulate. Contact your child’s pediatrician for additional information.

What Can I do with My Child Instead of Screen Time?

Creating healthy habits and behaviors is crucial to eliminating negative effects of screen time for families. Parents should recognize how their own technology habits provide example to their children. When parents learn to mediate use and balance between screen time and other activities, healthy habits evolve. Here is a list of positive activities to engage your young child in instead of screen time:

• Engage in conversation
• Sing songs
• Read books
• Make a craft
• Play with your child’s favorite toy
• Play a board game
• Host a play date
• Go to the park
• Play outside
• Go for a walk
• Go for a drive and talk about what you see along the way
• Teach your child a new skill
• Practice a sport
• Ride bicycle
• Cook together
• Plant seeds for flowers or a garden
• Do a family service project

For additional information about appropriate screen time apps and programs, check out this article about Navigating Screen Time or Common Sense Media.

Resources:

1. American Academy of Pediatrics, Council on Communications and Media. Media and Young Minds.  Pediatrics.

2. Chonchaiya et. al. Television Viewing Associates with Delayed Language Development. National Library of Medicine. 2008.

3. Birken, C. Handheld Screen Time Use Associated with Language Delay in Infants. The ASHA Leader.