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Center of Development uses a family based approach to therapy for your child. We want you as a family to be excited about learning more about your child's issues and advanced treatment techniques to help them. We focus on what the underlying cause of your child's delays are using a team of therapists that have advanced training in pediatric therapies and a holistic approach to treatment. All of our therapists love children, and are focused on not only what therapy interventions the child needs in therapy sessions, but what will work in the home setting to help you as a family carry out those techniques in your hectic daily life schedule. Therapy with children should look like play, it should be a wonderful time of bonding and creating connections with your child! Therapy at Center of Development is a time of learning how to best help your child develop, discovering your child's great potential, seeing your child's weaknesses turn into their newest achievement, watching your child meet milestones they could never achieve before, and helping create a better understanding of the blessing of being a parent and overcoming your child's special needs.

Building a child's self esteem is a very important part of what we do in therapy as we believe that this is a vital part of every individual's ability to meet their greatest potential!

Services offered at Center of Development: When you observe a therapy session at Center of Development, you may not be able to tell if the therapist is an OT, PT, Speech therapist, or Behavioral Therapist. This is a good thing! We want to address all of your child's developmental needs in each disciplines therapy session as you cannot separate different areas of development in a child, the body and brain work as a whole team, so we use a wholistic team based approach to therapy.

Treatment begins with an in-depth parent discussion and observations of your child. An extensive in-depth evaluation using clinical observations as well as the latest standardized evaluations will be done that will tell you as the family and all the professionals working with your child what the underlying causes are for the child's difficulties. Collaboration with the child's teacher, pediatrician, and other therapists is encouraged and information can be shared with the families permission. This will be the beginning of laying the ground work for a treatment program that is designed to help you as a family and other professionals help meet your child's needs. It will also help the professionals such as teachers understand your child better, and know what modifications and interventions to do to help them meet their educational goals.

Weekly therapy sessions and consultations are set up depending on your child's needs and your family schedule. Home therapy plans with easy to follow verbal, written, and demonstrations are given each therapy sessions to help you as a family understand and carry out therapy needs in the home setting.

1. Pediatric Occupational Therapy focuses on evaluation and treatment of a child's ability to perform at age appropriate levels in all environments. We often treat children with difficulties with touch, delayed movement skills, poor balance, muscle in-coordination, poor muscle tone, delayed fine motor skills, difficulty with meeting developmental milestones, behavioral issues, attention and focusing issues, difficulty with eating skills, picky eaters, poor handwriting skills, and many other delays in development.

2. Pediatric Developmental Therapy focuses on evaluation and treatment of a child's ability to meet gross motor, sensory motor, and developmental milestones. Examples of those needing physical therapy include any child with a developmental delay in , sitting, creeping, crawling, walking, poor balance control, poor muscle tone, poor transitional movements, poor motor coordination, and other disorders of childhood development that are impeding physical development.

***We will work diligently with your MD and insurance company to provide medically billable treatments through your insurance. We are providers for most medical insurance companies including BCBS and TennCare.

Other services offered at Center of Development:

Behavioral Therapies such as Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), Greenspan's Floortime Method, PECS communication and schedules, Positive Support Plans, Reward Systems, and in home and school trainings to help families and teachers turn behavior issues into very treatable and manageable symptoms that can be understood and treated.

The SOS (Sequential Oral Sensory) feeding program is a very successful and non-invasive developmental approach to dealing with problems with eating in children. It focuses on increasing a child's comfort level exploring and learning about the different properties of foods, including texture, smell, taste and consistency. The SOS approach allows a child to interact with food in a playful, non-stressful way. The SOS approach follows a hierarchy to feeding, beginning with the basic ability to tolerate food in the room, in front of him/her, touching and eventually tasting and eating foods.

Therapeutic Listening for children with auditory defensiveness, auditory processing disorders, difficulties with tolerating certain noises, difficulty with listening, difficulty with understanding speech, hearing delays, children with excessive sinus fluid on their middle ears, and speech delays. A sensory integrative treatment approach has traditionally been used to help clients who are challenged by difficulties with movement, auditory perception,language and/or learning. More recently, Occupational Therapists and other professionals have begun to incorporate sound-based technologies and methodologies into their practices. These stimulation programs combine the therapeutic benefits of music with sophisticated sound technology, enabling therapists to approach the auditory/vestibular system directly for faster results in the child meeting all developmental milestones.

Handwriting Without Tears Programs:

The Pre-K program introduces school readiness activities for children of all ability levels.  Body awareness, good writing habits, proper fine motor skills and pencil grip, foundational knowledge of letters, and beginning handwriting skills are all taught using movement, stimulating brain building connections, and multi-sensory manipulatives to ensure that your preschooler is more than ready for Kindergarten!

Handwriting Without Tears Printing Program, children learn to print neatly and comfortably with confidence and pride. The sequence of instruction is sensible and developmentally-based. While children enjoy mastering their fluency in printing, they are building the skills that will make the transition to cursive easy.

Cursive classes are offered as well using this same program!

The Brain-Body Connection Classes: we are very excited to start offering group based treatment programs for all ages. This is a short list of what is offered at The Brain Body Connection: