Occupational therapy provides strategies and supports to assist people to do the things they need and want to do, taking into account how this is affected by their personal

characteristics and the spaces they inhabit in their daily life. For  example, a school-aged child does  schoolwork and  plays in the playground at school, helps out with household chores and plays with their siblings at home, and might go to sports training and matches or music lessons  and  performances  in the community.

A disabled child such as a child with corpus callosum disability will have more difficulties with parts of those tasks than a typically developing child. What parts of the tasks they struggle with depend on the individual child’s personal characteristics, including whether they have any co-existing disabilities. Therefore, an occupational therapist’s suggestions for each child will be different.

As an occupational therapist with Agenesis of Corpus Callosum and other disabilities, I believe it is important to remember that children develop on their own timeline. There is no ‘right’ way of developing skills – there’s only the best way for each individual. This needs to be front of mind when we’re teaching children a new skill. We should be aware of why we’re teaching the new skill – is it so they “fit in” with their peers, or is it because it will actually help them grow into their best selves?

With that in mind, some areas that a child with ACC might struggle with that a paediatric occupational therapist could help with include:

• Executive functioning – the fancy name for thinking skills, problem solving, memory, task processing and understanding
  • Written or visual schedules to support regular routines are really helpful, here, as they assist our understanding of what to expect, which can reduce
  • Allowing extra time to support task processing is also
• Sensory processing – the way we organise, interpret and respond to sensory information from our eight sensory systems
  • These are the well-known five (touch, hearing, sight, smell, taste) plus three extra; our sense of balance and movement (vestibular), our sense of where our body is in space (proprioception) and our sense of our internal cues like hunger/fullness, thirst, temperature, and awareness of needing to use the toilet (interoception).
  • Everyone, typically developing and atypical, has a sensory profile and sensory Helping children understand their personal sensory processing will assist them and the adults around them to know how their senses influence their behaviour and why they might struggle in different environments.

• Gross motor skills – the movement skills that use the big muscles of our arms and legs and core muscles; for example, running, climbing, and riding a

• There are smaller tasks which affect how we’re able to do these, for example, our ability to coordinate our legs helps when we run or

• Fine motor skills – the movement skills that use the small muscles of our hands and fingers, with some help from our arms and core muscles; everything from tying our shoes to writing and typing our name or eating using
  • If our fingers find gripping things hard because of muscle weakness or stiffness, for example, these tasks become
• Arousal regulation development – the way we regulate our internal body systems to pay attention and manage our reactions to different
  • This may include emotional regulation development, the process of understanding our emotional expression and that of
• Social awareness development – the way we interpret, process and respond to social information provided from other people in our
  • It is worth noting that variations between typical and atypical people in this area aren’t deficits, but
  • Developing social awareness does not come from learning set social rules as part of a training program, but from learning the importance of different social contexts, personal boundaries, and self-advocacy.
• Play development, e.g. functional or imaginative play – the way we interact with the world around us when at
  • There is no right or wrong way to play. Play is an important way of exploring and processing our

Many of these skills are interconnected, and understanding the effects of one area on another can really assist children and the adults around them to create the best environment that helps children grow. For example, gross motor skills are the foundation for and support of fine motor skills, so working on or having accommodations for the former can often improve the latter.

Personally, I find the most interesting areas to work with are sensory processing, arousal regulation and executive functioning. This interest is built from my own experiences, as well as my professional understanding that these areas are the building blocks that form the foundation to other skills. For example, we shouldn’t expect a child to be able to focus on writing if they’re distracted by too much noise in their environment.

Evaluating my sensory profile through an occupational therapy lens has helped me understand how my sensory processing affects my arousal regulation and how to support it, including using executive functioning shortcuts such as daily schedules, to-do lists or planners, and timed reminders.

Understanding how these skill areas overlap and affect me has helped me advocate for myself and find the strategies I need to live, work and play well in my daily life. In my work as a paediatric occupational therapist, I aim to support children and their families to develop this understanding and advocacy in their own lives.

By Clare Keogh,

Neurodivergent Paediatric Occupational Therapist

Autistic with Agenesis of Corpus Callosum and Dandy-Walker Syndrome ClareAKeogh.OT@gmail.com