What is a Sensory Diet?

If your child is suspected of having Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) or has recently been diagnosed with SPD, your child's doctor or occupational therapist may recommend a sensory diet for you to do with your child at home. Your child will typically see an occupational therapist once or twice a week, but daily therapy is best for your child to improve. It's not practical for your child to see an OT every day so it's up to the parents to help their child with therapy at home by providing a sensory diet.

The term sensory diet was first introduced by OT Patricia Wilbarger. It is a personalized plan of different activities or therapies to be performed with the child's specific needs in mind. A sensory seeker will need calming activities while a sensory avoider will need stimulation. Just as adults need to take a warm bath at night to rewind or drink coffee to wake up, kids need help regulating themselves.

A sensory diet is designed to help your child cope with his or her SPD and also to help you learn to recognize your child's special needs and how to intervene and help your child. It will help your child tolerate and challenge him to endure situations he may find challenging. Sensory stimulation can help increase attention span almost immediately and will show lasting effects of attention span. Since your child will receive his sensory input from you, it will decrease his need for sensory input through behaviors that may harm him. Sensory input can also help your child regulate and better handle transitions and stress.

Sensory diets are normally developed by your child's occupational therapist. For a sensory diet to be effective it must provide just the right amount of stimulation. It will also need to be tailored to your child's environment such as home or school and the time of day. The ingredients, if you will, of a sensory diet include all five traditional senses as well as proprioceptive and vestibular. The proprioceptive sense is sensory input from joints and muscles that tell the child where his body is in relation to space. The vestibular sense deals with the sense of movement as indicated by the inner ear.

As with all things related to children, a sensory diet will be largely dictated by the child themselves. If the child is uncooperative it's important not to force the child so as not to create undo stress and a negative association with the therapy. Once your child realizes that this will make him feel better both during and after treatment he will soon be more receptive to therapy.