KidSkills Pediatric Occupational Therapy, Vancouver ADHD Specialist

03/02/2026

An important piece of the human puzzle is called interoception. It’s the eighth sense, that allows us to process sensory input from our internal organs.

It gives us information of whether our muscles are tight or loose, if our heartbeat is fast or slow, if our stomach rumbles, if our breath is fast or slow, if our body is cold or hot, if our bladder is full, etc.

When we are able to process those sensory signals accurately, we are able to reach a self-regulated state. Just like with any other sense, people can have hyposensitivty or hypersensitivity.

Sometimes children may feel shame to talk directly about their emotions. Discussing their daily body’s sensory signals and helping them pay attention to those signals in the moment, the strategies they used to eliminate an uncomfortable body sensation, can help increase their interoceptive awareness and contribute to their ability to better self-regulate.

02/12/2026

The feedback we receive from caregivers about the Cog-Fun intervention for kids with ADHD includes praises like:

- The process was amazing and meaningful.
- I was positively surprised.
- I learned a lot as a parent!
- Throughout the sessions my child shares about their experiences (e.g. at school) that I haven’t heard before.
- It’s a special one-on-one time with my child.
- My child is less restless at home and at school.
- My child displays coping abilities and patience he has never displayed before.
- My child is now able to pause for a few seconds before he reacts to their sibling.

Those amazing results are not just because of this unique OT intervention for kids with ADHD and/or my therapeutic skills and experience. It’s also because those caregivers were dedicated to the intervention and were able to do the carryover to the home environment.

This type of feedback gives therapists like me the motivation to keep doing what we are doing!

01/31/2026

We love obstacle courses! It’s a great OT tool to learn about our body in space, to practice motor skills, response inhibition, to get a movement break, to transfer between activities, and to use it as a fun tool when we work towards sensory processing/cognitive/self-regulation goals.

01/29/2026

How do we choose our clients?

It’s true that initially clients choose us, because they were referred to us by another professional, by a school, by recommendation; because they know about our expertise, because they liked how we communicated with them on the phone during the initial intake.

However, we also need to carefully choose our clients. We want to make sure it’s a good fit, that the child needs to see an OT and not another professional. We want to make sure that we can support this child according to what the caretakers shares with us. Each OT has their expertise.

It requires the OT to ask different questions. It requires the OT to be true to themselves, have integrity, to be honest and also to be assertive.

01/16/2026

01/14/2026

I usually don’t remember my dreams, but this morning I did. I remembered my frustration as I was on my way to take a bus to the place I needed to go, when I noticed that I had left my bag at the school I had visited earlier with my brother.

Was did this dream want to tell me?
Was it about the struggles we have in our lives that keep pulling us backwards and frustrate us as we strive to move forwards?

Was it about the fact that my 87 year old mom cannot change for the better, and that we and her new caretaker need to accept her as she is now, and work with what we have?

Was it about the singer that I watched competing in a singing competition, who had lost her voice and had to sing with the voice she had?

I’ll never know, but I just know that life teaches us that only when we move through those barriers, we grow and get better and better, and that we need to push through, and we can do it!

12/29/2025

How do we know as parents of vulnerable children when to push the child and when to reduce demands? It’s all depends on the equation of wellbeing: Resources vs. Demands.

If the demands placed on a child are greater than their resources (his abilities, the support he can get, etc.), that child will be in distress, and that means we will need to lower demands. That’s it.

12/28/2025

Our brain is always looking 👀 for answers that will help it complete or close a subject. It’s looking for causation, but this causation often entails judgments. If a child doesn’t behave as socially expected, we may say things like: it’s emotional, it’s behavioural, they seek attention, their parents don’t set enough boundaries, and often, it’s sensory - a referral to OT is required, etc.

When it comes to atypical children, who have a different nervous system, unexpected or challenging behaviours can often be interpreted in a different way, and there can be more than ten different reasons that underlie their behaviour.

For example, if the child is perceived as violent, it may be that:
1. They may experience something painful or disturbing.
2. They may be interested in something that the other person have and want to engage with it or get it.
3. Being forced to do something they don’t like or they are not successful of or that what they like doing is not permitted.
4. They don’t understand where they are being taken to and what for.
5. Accumulation of stress that causes emotional pain and outbursts.
6. Anxiety.

When it comes to atypical children, we need to give up our automatic judgements and dig in deeper to find the actual causation for a challenging behaviour in order to find the right solution.

12/22/2025

A common case: Parents refer their child to OT because the child displays tactile hyper-responsiveness that limits their tolerance to clothes, and causes the child and their family to have a stressful morning.

As for any other reason for referral, we need to take an holistic view, and assess the child’s function in other areas of their lives. If we focus only on the child’s sensory processing skills, we will not be able to do an accurate assessment and we will not be able to see results.

11/05/2025

Bring it on 😁🤩🥰

11/03/2025

When I was young, I had to occupy myself quietly in my bedroom, while my mom had her holy rest and nap between 2:00-4:00pm. She was a nurse, and as a post traumatic, she suffered from insomnia. I did not know it back then, but I knew that she really needed her sleep.

We also could not play outside between those times. We lived in an apartment building and that was the rule.

Sometimes we cycle back to our childhood experiences and they magically become a main part of our future occupation…

So what could I do on my own? Reading books, Puzzles, Tangram, copying designs with a stencil, drawing/doodling, colouring mandalas, making parquetry designs. I was good with shapes and colours. I was good with visual analysis and synthesis, and metacognitive skills, and I loved it!

In the afternoon or evening I would sometimes play Mastermind, Checkers or Dominos with my father. On the weekends we played Monopoly and my dad and I competed on finding puzzle pieces, while assembling a 1000-10,000 jigsaw puzzles in the dining area.

It’s so funny how some of those games and activities have become the main therapeutic tool in my OT practice. It’s so magical how I teach kids ways to develop those executive skills that I practiced back then as a very young child.

11/02/2025

So much beauty around us this season. WOW!!!