For two and half months last fall, I felt like a prisoner wearing a ball and chain. Not on my foot, but on my left hand. Not a ball made of iron, but of therapy appointments two or three times a week as well as hand and thumb exercises every two hours.

Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.

Lugging around the ball and chain designed to restore the function of a severed thumb tendon, I had plenty of time to think about kids who go to all sorts of therapy appointments. Who are assigned endless exercises, not for a few months, but for a lifetime. Whose parents drive them to therapy, schedule the appointments, and supervise exercises.

Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year.

During my stint with therapy, I came up with techniques to motivate myself. Many of them were plucked from the bag of tricks I used during my teaching years to motivate students. I’m passing them on to you, hopeful that they will lighten the weight of the therapy ball and chain and make therapy fun for your child.

Tip #1: Use Normal Daily Movements as Therapy

Many of the pictures of the exercises assigned by the therapist listed daily movements that used the same muscles and motions. One of them was folding laundry. So on laundry day, I folded clothes (something my husband usually does) instead of doing the exercises because it felt more purposeful. If children can occasionally substitute normal daily movements for contrived exercises, they’ll feel like they had a exercise break, but you’ll know better.

Tip #2: Make Therapy Fun

My idea of fun is not squeezing a ball of thera-putty for ten minutes twice a day. Most days I forced myself to do it. But the weekend we visited our grandkids was a different story. Rolling and squeezing the thera-putty with my three-year-old grandson was so much fun neither of us wanted to put it away. We rolled snakes, made them kiss, and squeezed them into cookie cutters. We even made a short video to show the hand therapist at my next appointment. All it took to turn drudgery to fun was a child’s imagination and an adult’s willingness to act like a kid again.

To read the rest of this post, visit the Not Alone website at www.specialneedsparenting.com.

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