The Play Way story. My name's Kait Cummins. I'm an occupational therapist, a mom of four, and I live in rural Victoria. I've been working in the child development space for almost 20 years now, and the play way has been a long time in the making. In 2016, I started. Feeling a bit of burnout, from my role as an occupational therapist.
I was doing a lot of kilometers traveling out to support children in their natural environment, kindergarten, school, home, et cetera. And I guess just really feeling. Incredibly frustrated that many of the strategies I felt like I was using and I had been taught over the years were just band-aiding problems.
It wasn't really getting to the crux of what I felt the underlying issues were, and for so many of the kids that I was working with are experiencing developmental delays or disabilities, but a lot of the things that we were working on were things that. That if we did get to the underlying cause, if we could get to the root of it, that we could make some really significant impact with.
And over the course of that time, I started to really look at what were these things that we needed to address that were at the crux of what was happening for the kids in the families that I was working with that would get the most impact for these kids in the work that we were doing. And it came down to these six foundations.
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Or what I started to call these six foundations.
It was love and connection, so having at least one person in their life that genuinely loved and cared about them and who they felt safe and supported with. The second one was. Having good quality sleep. So many of the kids that we work with have got either medical issues or other factors that are impacting the quality of sleep that they're getting at night.
Maybe it's related to snoring or mouth breathing or tonsils or adenoids. Maybe there's allergies or sleep apnea or other factors that are at play that are impacting the ability to get good quality deep sleep. And when kids don't get deep sleep it. Impacts their regulation during the day, their irritability, their behavior, their capacity to learn, and that then has significant consequences on their cognitive and learning development.
So we really need to make sure that we are recognizing and addressing that straight up or otherwise, anything we do is a bandaid. The next one is real food. Again, a common factor for many of the kids that I work with is fussy eating and. Whilst fussy eating is really common for kids who are neurodiverse and that have developmental delays, there's an element to it where there's something going on in their gut.
And when we can get to the bottom of that and we can, when we can make some shifts in the types of foods they're eating, when they're eating how we're eating, we get rid of some of those chemicals that are really contributing to this opioid effect on the brain or to that potentially is seeping seeking.
Through their gut, into their bloodstream. And then the chemicals are impacting on their behavior, their regulation, their emotional state, their their calmness and their attention levels, all of those sorts of things. Food has a monster impact on how we learn and grow. And so when we can understand what might be happening for these kids, we can see, again, some really significant shifts in a really short amount of time.
Otherwise, what we see often with some of these kids is that they've got crazy challenges around attention and behavior. And we can put all the sensory strategies we want in, but if we haven't addressed the chemical that's causing the those behaviors, then we're actually not gonna make lasting and significant change.
So I am a big believer in the real food piece, and it doesn't need to be as complicated as it sounds. I think often when we think about real food and we think about having to change a fussy eater's diet. It just, we just put that in the two hard basket because these kids can be really controlling when it comes to food.
And for many of us, we've tried all the tricks in the book and we're not moving, um, making any significant change. And it becomes really disheartening and it feels quite overwhelming. So we wanna debunk some of the challenges around, um, food and really simplify our approach to food. And the same goes with the sleep stuff.
Once we get the medical piece sort of sorted, we can then really simplify. What are the things that really matter when it comes to helping our kids get good quality, deep sleep? And there's often a link between food and sleep as well. So if you've got a child that's experiencing a challenge in one of those areas, is likely some sort of correlation between the two that we need to get to the bottom of.
Um, movement. Now, movement's interesting one because some of our kids get plenty of movement time and. The challenge then becomes what's actually going on, like within their inner ear, within their vestibular system. Have they had chronic ear infections? Are there other things that are at play that might be impacting whether that movement that they're getting through the day is impactful or not?
Because some kids that have say vestibular processing difficulty because they've had chronic ear infections or glue ear, or they were premature, or other factors that have sort of gone on in their world, they can sometimes get really silly. Really anxious. All really fatigued from movement, and that then can really impact on the quality of life that they're having through the day.
And they can be getting in trouble for behavior, or they can be having trouble transitioning in, particularly at nighttime or sitting up at the table for meal times and things. And so we're seeing all of these complex behaviors or this sort of neediness or suckiness or difficulty with transitions and what's at play is this underlying movement issue that.
We need to address to or under at at the very least, understand so that we are not sort of applying behavior strategies to something that's potentially a movement issue. So getting an understanding of. Of movement from a physiological point of view around how, um, how their body is processing it, but also looking at movement from a dopamine point of view as well.
And where are our kids getting our dopamine from? So often our kids are getting their dopamine hit from sugary foods, from, um, the TV screen or digital. Uh. Digital sort of screen time things as opposed to getting the dopamine from things where there's a pain element to it. Like for example, movement. If you're getting outside and you're running around, you're huffing and puffing.
It's it, it's hard. It's hard work on your body. And so then the dopamine hit that you get from that lasts longer in it. You get a more positive effect for longer. Whereas if you're getting that instant hit like we do when we pick up our phone, that hit only lasts for as long as we're holding the phone in our hands and we're scrolling as soon as we put it back down, we get that, um, the loss of that dopamine and it makes us feel really yucky.
And the same is true for our kids. And so we often see then behaviors associated with when the sugary food's taken away or the screen is turned off. Um. That their body is then going, oh, where's my dopamine gone? I feel like crap. I need something to replace that. And so helping us understand how things like movement, time in nature free play, um, can impact those dopamine levels and help our bodies feel at their best.
Um. And I think that probably nearly covers off them all. So we've talked about love and connection. We've talked about quality, sleep, real food, time in nature, movement and free play. They're the six foundations that I believe are essential for raising happy, healthy, and confident kids. And when we can simplify back how.
How are we structuring our day, how we're prioritizing what's important for us and for our kids, and we can keep those foundations in mind. Then what we find is there's less need for the band-aids. There's less need for us to have to have all of the fancy strategies for supporting emotional regulation from managing challenging behaviors, from breaking up fights between siblings.
Because when our nervous system is feeling good, when we're regulated and our body's feeling good, and we are getting healthy doses of dopamine throughout the day when we don't have sugar spikes and crashes happening all day, when we've had good quality rest, and we're not chronically overtired like so many of our kids tend to be.
We've had plenty of time out in nature with our feet connected to the earth so that all of the energy is able to exit our body with our shoes. Off because the, the rubber in our shoes blocks that energy from being able to exit from our body. All of those basics. When, when we start making those, they're not big shifts.
They're just these tiny little one percenter shifts to our day. Then our nervous system starts to calm. Then we see our kids' nervous system start to calm, and then so many of the things that were problems for us to begin with. Are no longer problems, or if they are still problems. The intensity of them has really gone out of it, and it makes it so much easier for us to elicit change.
For many of the kids that I've worked with over the years, it was like. The strategies we were trying to do was like trying to keep a lid on a bubbling pot, and once we were able to address these foundations sort of from the ground up, then the kids were in a much more calm and regulated state, and then implementing these new techniques or these new strategies became so much easier because they weren't as dysregulated to begin with.
So. I guess it's my intention as we can support you in our community, um, is that we can together identify these common challenges that nearly all of us are having around things like sleeping, feeding, behavior, um, anxiety, um, dopamine addiction, screen time, huge emotional outbursts. Difficulty getting along with siblings.
All of those most common challenges that we face as parents. You're not alone in this. We are all in it together, and the more we can sort of share our challenges, talk through the things that are working, understand, and, and reflect on. What simplification looks like, what going back to basics looks like, what prioritizing these pillars looks like, then we can really help you.
Um, I wanna say problem solve, but I also guess I'm, I'm thinking that, that there is an element of this that's simplification now. Simple doesn't mean easy necessarily. And there's definitely some mental shifts and some mindset shifts, behavior shifts that we need to make largely, and a lot of it does start with ourselves.
And sometimes that's hard to hear because we, our first point of call is wanting to fix a kid. I. Often it's about fixing ourselves. And when we become more aware of these things and we can come calmer in ourselves, then it makes us easier to follow our gut when it comes to the problem solving piece. And, um, we don't necessarily then need to be looking outside of ourselves to all of the experts for the solutions to some of these problems because we'll intuitively know what needs to happen next, but we often don't trust ourselves.
So being able to. Um, feel safe and secure in ourselves. Feel supported from the community that's around us, knowing that we can seek the advice and support if we are needing it. Um, and that we've got that sort of trusted advice that gets. To the, the real problem and not just the bandaid, um, strategies over the top.
All of that, I think can bring some really great peace of mind. So if you, if you feel like this is where you are at and that you need a bit more support and a bit more help in working through some of these things, please check out our parent hub or reach out and ask some questions. We'd be more than happy to support you on this journey.
