Parents and carers of children with special needs benefitted from a wonderful collaboration between Sports for Confidence and Dream. The Change, CIC.
Occupational therapist (OT) Robert Walker and Occupational therapy assistant, Charlie Charlton, from Sports for Confidence, held three inspirational workshops to help those connected with our organisation to improve their lives and well-being.
The aim of the workshops was to build our members’ and their children’s capabilities and confidence to use physical activity in their daily life routines to promote social, physical, emotional, and sensory regulation.
Paulina Rangel, Advisory board member, said, ” We hope that the parents and carers who attended these workshops have learnt how using sport and physical activity can help individuals achieve their goals and lead better lives.
One parent said after the first workshop, “The workshop was helpful the guys were very clear on explaining things also they were happy to answer questions.”
During the first workshop Robert and Charlie explained their role as OTs and their approach to adapting tasks, activity, and environment to give all those attending opportunity to engage and participate in physical activity.
They explained what they do and how it had benefitted people who had previously done their workshops.
The second workshop explored the benefits of doing physical activity and how it supports the development of children and young people in relation to their physical, social, sensory, and emotional abilities.
Robert and Charlie explained how it is the parents/carer’s role and responsibility to include physical activity in their children’s everyday lives.
Robert said, “The more physical active that can be encouraged and promoted with children, the more they will gain the confidence to embrace physical activity and physical interventions which will enable them to develop transferrable skills to incorporate throughout their daily lives.”
The third workshop explored Sensory Integration. The OTs explained what sensory processing is and what the sensory systems are.
Robert also discussed some of the communication behaviours that parents/carers may see in their child/young person when they are finding it difficult to regulate something.
He talked about how the children or young people may behave when they are experiencing the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and shutdown.
The benefits of this workshop was exploring the use of physical activity as a therapeutic means to enable our member’s child/young person to feel and be regulated.
Lastly, Robert and Charlie talked about Sensory circuits and gave an introduction into co and self-regulation and universal recommendations. They explained to our members what to do when a child/young person is becoming dysregulated.
Jemal, Co-founder of Dream The Change said, “We’d like to thank Robert and Charlie from Sport for Confidence for conducting these informative workshops which help improve the quality of the lives of our members and their children with special needs. We would also like to thank the National Lottery for funding that made this collaboration with Sport for Confidence possible for the benefit of families from the local community.”
