We offer parent’s groups and camps through the year! To learn more about group offerings please click here.

Occupational Therapy is a regulated health profession concerned with improving well-being and helping clients meet their goals.

Occupational Therapy can help you achieve a goal by:

• improving your skills
• recommending accommodations to the task (figuring how the task can be done differently to suit), or
• recommending equipment or other changes to the environment.
• We are a profession that draws on a broad-base of professional frameworks to help come up with solutions to everyday challenges.

We provide assessment and treatment for the a variety of issues you might be experiencing at home, such as:

• Temper tantrums, outbursts, meltdowns
• Anxiety – your child feels worried, or is just acting out and inflexible
• Your child struggles to print neatly — or can’t read their writing
• Oversensitivity to sounds, feels, or movement
• Troubles with getting them to transition
• Picky Eating – sensitive to textures or tastes, meal times are stressful
• Socially – your child needs help playing co-operatively, or making and keeping friends
• Teen services — emotion coaching and organizational skills
• Parent support — training, strategies and a plan to help you know what to do to address these difficulties at home.
• • • •  

Paediatric Occupational Therapy is focused on helping children overcome barriers in their everyday lives so that they can develop the skills they need to succeed in friendships, at school and at home.

Our Occupational Therapists can assess a child’s:

• self-regulation skills
• sensory processing
• printing and writing skills
• visual perceptual skills
• developmental milestones
• fine and gross motor skills
• drawing skills
• feeding issue
• play skills

Our therapists are focused on feedback to families and solutions that will help their day to day life. Our therapists can help with strategies, parent coaching or direct intervention as per the family’s choices. Our clinic has an engaging sensory room with suspended equipment with padded mats.

Developed by Occupational Therapists at Vital Links, Therapeutic Listening is a tool for treating people of all ages who have difficulty with processing sensory information, listening, attending, and communicating.

Therapeutic Listening has been successfully used at Pathways Therapy to address:

• Increased Focus and Attention
• Greater Tolerance to Noise (esp low frequencies like vacuum and blender and crowded noisy environments like restaurants, school hallways etc.)
• Improved Sleep
• Less Anxiety
• Better Moods
• Fewer Tantrums

How Does It Work?

High-quality music, recorded specifically for Therapeutic Listening, is altered to exaggerate the sounds that naturally capture attention and tap into the parts of the brain involved in regulating bodily functions, relating to others, and organizing behaviour. Since the auditory system has connections to many parts of the brain, sound is a powerful way to access the nervous system and affect changes on many levels.

While a client is listening to the music they are participating in a variety of movement activities designed to build their body sense, support core musculature / better breathing, and stretch their ability to plan and generate an adaptive response. An adaptive response is defined as planned, self-generated, goal-oriented behaviour. In this way, they are ‘stretching’ their ability to organize and interpret sound information while organizing a response at the same time with their bodies in a developmentally appropriate activity.

Therapeutic Listening is a “work out” for the ears and auditory cortex, building better and stronger pathways for auditory processing. It also helps the child develop divided attention and inhibition of their instinct to redirect their attention to every novel auditory cue in their environment. The rhythmic and highly novel music is very calming and organizing to children and the rhythmicity helps the child develop their own internal sense of timing, a foundation skill for coordination.