When your child needs therapy, finding the right setting can make a big difference in their progress. While clinic-based therapy is a great option, it’s not always the most convenient choice for every family. That’s where school- and daycare-based pediatric therapy comes in.

By bringing therapy into the places where children spend most of their day, we can provide support in a familiar environment, collaborate with teachers and caregivers, and help kids apply their skills in real-world situations. My name is Stacy Levy, and I’m here to talk with you about what to expect with school- or daycare-based pediatric therapy.

The Benefits of Pediatric Therapy in a School or Daycare Setting

At Dynamic Therapy Specialists, we offer a variety of ways for your child to get the help that they need. One of the ways is for us to have our therapists go to a school or daycare where your child spends most of their day, and they can receive therapy at that location. Currently, we offer occupational therapy and speech therapy outside of our clinic. The audiology and auditory processing therapy continues to be offered in-house.

When we’re talking about school- and daycare-based therapy, we’re talking about the therapist going into the school with the school’s or daycare’s permission and providing that intervention. There are some really great reasons why this is a beneficial option for you.

The main benefit is that the children are at school or daycare for a lot of time. Those teachers and those daycare workers know a lot about your child and how your child interacts with the curriculum and their peers. This information is really good for us to know and to talk with them about in general.

Younger Children Often Receive “Push-In” Therapy

Oftentimes, when our children are younger in the daycare setting, a lot of places really encourage us to do push-in therapy. But what is push-in therapy? It’s where the therapist goes into the daycare, pre-K, or kindergarten classroom where they can provide simultaneous intervention while the child is receiving instruction.

There are a lot of benefits to this approach. The teacher can observe and gain knowledge of how to engage with that child successfully, and how to help that child with fine motor skills or communication difficulties, for example. Doing this “natural environment” type of work would be ideal, but it’s not always an option.

Older Children Often Receive One-on-One Therapy

We will also offer one-on-one pull-out therapy. This is where we are still working with the child in that educational setting, and we are pulling them out of the classroom. That provides some great opportunities where we get to observe the child before we pick them up. When they come with us, we’re able to work on whatever we might have observed, and we’re able to do it in a less distracting manner and more intensive fashion.

It also provides the opportunity for us to build relationships with the child’s teachers so that we can provide them with some real-life techniques and strategies that will help that child. Much like what we would do if you were to come into the clinic, where we would be doing that with the parents, we would be providing techniques and strategies (based on what we’ve seen in our one-on-one sessions or our social group settings) for the teachers, as well.

Are There Any Downsides to School- or Daycare-Based Therapy?

The negative to school-based or daycare-based therapy would be that it does make it more difficult to keep the parents engaged, but we hope that we found a solution with that. We have home programs that we send home, as well as videos that we send to parents that explain and show what their child is doing in the setting that we’re seeing them in.

The other solution besides the home programming is that we strongly encourage that the parents bring the children into the clinic to be seen when there’s a spring break, a winter holiday, or summer break.

That way we are able to then provide that one-on-one education like we’re doing with the teachers and the daycare providers. We’re able to have the opportunity for the parents to observe what we’re doing and provide examples of strategies and techniques that they can use at home that would be beneficial.

Combining School-Based Therapy with Clinic-Based Therapy Is Ideal

In general, the more that we can provide adults in the child’s life with these techniques and strategies for success, then the child’s going to reach their outcomes faster and they’re going to maintain their progress and generalize it to all settings. It really is a great opportunity to take advantage of these school- and daycare-based options where possible.

But also know that the key to your child’s success no matter where you receive therapy, is adult engagement. That’s why we really do encourage you to also come into the clinic, because it is helpful to be able to see your kid work with the therapist and hear how the therapist interacts with your child. And we think it’s a beautiful thing to be a part of.

Reach Out to Dynamic Therapy Specialists to Get Started

If you’re not sure if your child would benefit from therapy, I would encourage you to take our free developmental screener, and it will indicate whether or not your child would benefit from an evaluation or getting started with intervention. 

Or, if you already know and you’re interested in these options, I encourage you to give our office a call at (225) 767-5032 or you can email us at info@dtsbr.com.