We introduce our first F word of the season, FUNCTION. The definition of function is what people do and luckily for children, play is what they do.

What we want for our children is for them to be able to play.

We discuss that in the “old days” treatment looked different, the idea was to “fix” what was wrong in order for the person to function but it never did that. These days, the focus is on doing something that is meaningful for the participant and doing it in a way that is functional for them.

When taking function into account when setting goals it's important to think how this will help with function. We discuss what this looks like for a really young child starting out in therapy not knowing what their future function will look like, how do you set goals?

Dayna explains a lot of the goals for this age are to do with play so it's important to think about what your child needs to be able to play, such as pointing to what they want, head control, sitting, climbing and all things that can lead to play.

It's important to remember function looks different for everyone and is not always how the majority of people do something. A great example Dayna uses is asking someone that uses glasses to remove their glasses because the majority of people can do things without glasses. That's not functional for everyone.

The ultimate aim is to help our children do what it is they want to do, how they can best do it so they can be happy and functional in their own way.