What happens when a child has too much sensory input but still struggles to act?
Read & listenWe promised more terminology and then did what we always do, followed a real child instead.
Read & listenHow do you explain something like ocular motor control to a parent without losing them in jargon?
Read & listenThis one is warm and personal before it gets clinical.
Read & listenWhat do we actually mean when we say a child has sensory issues?
Read & listenWhat happens when a group of scientists who develop medical treatments come and watch relationship-based therapy up close for the first time?
Read & listenPlay is the work of childhood, so what exactly are we doing when we use it in therapy?
Read & listenThis is a love letter to two of Jean Ayres’ core ideas, the just right challenge and the adaptive response, with the books physically open on the table.
Read & listenFollow the child’s lead might be the most repeated phrase in paediatric therapy, and one of the most misunderstood.
Read & listenWhen we say a child is over- or under-responsive, we’re usually describing their behaviour, not what their nervous system is actually doing.
Read & listenOur very first guest episode, and we could not have hoped for a warmer one.
Read & listenHow does interoception change as we move through the polyvagal states?
Read & listenThis one goes to the heart of why touch matters, not just for babies and attachment, but for the whole of a life.
Read & listenLast episode we kept dodging praxis.
Read & listenThe running joke is that Cory cannot get to praxis fast enough, so this episode makes her wait: a proper deep dive into somatosensory processing before praxis is allowed in the room.
Read & listenThe mirror image of last episode: if Episode 17 was the child who avoids movement, this is the child who never stops, the classic seeker on the go.
Read & listenFresh from four days at a polyvagal gathering, where she presented, Tracy brings back one quietly reorienting idea: co-regulation is not something you switch on when a child melts down, it is a continual presence of connection.
Read & listenThe case Tracy promised last episode, told in full: an 18-year-old autistic woman who had not leaned over, washed her hair tipped back, or gone down open stairs in over a decade.
Read & listenWhy do OTs test reflexes like the ATNR and tonic labyrinthine, and what do we actually do with what we find?
Read & listenRecorded with Cory four months into new motherhood (and Michelle pushing through COVID), this one is personal: nothing teaches you what predictability does for a nervous system like losing it.
Read & listenMichelle planned a session full of ball play.
Read & listenA reflective, case-free episode on the tension every therapist knows: you plan the activities, but you never plan how you will show up.
Read & listenImitation sounds simple, the copycat game that drives siblings mad, but it turns out to be one of the most foundational things a nervous system does.
Read & listenThis is the unfiltered continuation of Episode 10, a real clinical conversation, twists and all, about how executive functions actually come together.
Read & listenExecutive functions usually get talked about as cognitive skills you teach.
Read & listenOnce a child has the basics of regulation and starts bringing their own play ideas, a new tension shows up: when do you follow, and when do you teach?
Read & listenComing back after a long hiatus, we turn to the social realm and the question OTs are uniquely placed to ask: how does the capacity to regulate let us be social at all?
Read & listenThis is our first full case with a real child, a seven-year-old boy with a mixed sensory profile that refused to fit the textbook.
Read & listenPart 2 goes back to the sensory base of modulation and asks how it actually works, and why it breaks down.
Read & listenMost of us learn sensory modulation as a volume dial: turn some inputs up, turn others down.
Read & listenSensory discrimination is the detail: not just that you were touched, but exactly what, where and how much.
Read & listenPraxis is how we generate brand-new skilfulness: the first kick, the first climb, the first time the body works out something it has never done.
Read & listenA 12-year-old comes in for handwriting help, and within minutes the real story is sitting underneath him: a postural system that cannot hold him upright long enough to write.
Read & listenThis is where it all begins.
Read & listen