Are you troubled that your child responds differently to sensation than other children? Does your child react negatively to sounds or bright lights or doesn’t like messy play? Is your child fearful with movement or seek out excessive swinging, spinning or rough play? Deficits in sensory processing, poor body awareness and muscle weakness may make it difficult for your child to hop, skip, catch a ball, color, cut with scissors, use a spoon to eat or even dress like children the same age. The UCP OT team can help your child overcome sensory and motor challenges to be successful and confident in their daily lives. UCP’s therapists will use fun activities to improve processing of sensory information, overall strength and coordination, motor planning, coordination of the two sides of the body, visual perceptual skills, visual motor skills and hand skills. Our OT team can help children use the sensory and motor information they receive from their body and their world around them to be independent in life’s simple childhood tasks such as play, self-help and learning. With the UCP OT Team’s help, your child can overcome life’s challenges with the just right challenge!

Whether the concern for your child is picky eating, poor breast or bottle feeding, failure to thrive, food allergies, intolerance to textures, difficulty chewing, or even transitioning from G-tube to oral feeding, help can be found at the UCP Feeding Clinic. Our trained feeding therapists can assist in addressing the entire feeding experience beginning from birth, and even on to adolescence. The team understands that diagnoses such as premature birth, food allergies, and other developmental delays can significantly interrupt typical feeding and swallowing development. Our feeding clinic team uses a variety of play based feeding therapy techniques and a multi-disciplinary, sensory-oral approach with the guidance of an occupational therapist and a speech therapist. Through this approach, our team will teach kids to have positive experiences with food, learn mealtime routines with their families, increase tolerance to the smell, touch and taste of food, increase the range and volume of food they will eat and increase the skills it takes to tolerate age appropriate foods. Our experienced feeding therapists will work together with parents, caregivers, and medical professionals to attain the results your child needs. Let UCP Feeding Clinic be the last stop to your child’s feeding challenges and the first step to becoming a successful eater! Use UCP’s checklist to see if your child might benefit from a feeding evaluation.

If you are concerned about your child’s large motor skills, UCPs PT team may be able to help. Muscle weakness, abnormally low or high muscle tone, limited movement in joints or poor balance may prevent your child from walking, running, playing on playground equipment or climbing stairs. Our PTs help children be independent. UCP’s highly trained therapists are skilled in facilitating movement and mobility to improve a child’s motor development and function by using fun age appropriate activities to increase a child’s strength and endurance, motor learning, balance and coordination. Our PT team knows how to create learning opportunities using play to address physical challenges children may face in their daily lives. Our team can also help children and their families with positioning, techniques, transferring and lifting, obtaining orthotics/prosthetics, purchasing adaptive equipment and using assistive technology. The UCP PT team can help your child overcome to live life without limitations!

Are you worried that your child is not talking, not talking in complete sentences or are hard to understand? UCP SLP team help children, who do not talk like other children their age, do not follow directions, have difficulty getting words out, appear to stutter, have hoarse voices or speech is affected by hearing impairment. Our SLP facilitate children’s speech and language skills by focusing on the “how-to” of talking including making sounds, pronunciation and the coordination of mouth muscles and movements to produce speech. Our SLP team knows how to help children understand what they see or hear and overcome struggles with finding the right words or organizing words in a meaningful way. They can help your child to communicate their special message or simply hold a conversation with you. When a child can communicate their wants, needs and thoughts, frustration can be prevented that sometimes leads to negative behaviors. Your child can overcome these challenges to grow in both understanding and speaking words with help from our UCP SLP team!