About Dandelion Kids Therapy Services, PLLC

Our Mission

At Dandelion Kids, we believe that every child deserves the opportunity to reach their full potential. Our mission is to provide exceptional occupational therapy services in natural settings, where children feel most comfortable and can achieve their best outcomes.

We offer services in the comfort of your home, in the school setting, or in the outdoors as nature-based OT.

Why Nature-based OT?

My own appreciation for this unique service-delivery model is rooted from before I even became an Occupational Therapist. After graduating from college with a Bachelor's in Anthropology, I decided to join the Peace Corps, and was sent off to the beautiful country of Cambodia, where my assignment was to teach English to rural middle and high school students, and work directly with the local English teachers to improve their skills for teaching the English language. It was in this setting, teaching in an open-air rural school in a small fishing and farming village, surrounded by rice patties and a river that fed into the Lake Tonle Sap, that I developed a deep and profound appreciation for the outdoor environment and the calm it both embodied and facilitated in students and professionals alike. It's also important to note that not only were the classrooms open-air, but the homes as well; also equally important and noteworthy is knowing that nearly every student and teacher participated in the rice farming processes that included planting, transplanting, and harvesting the rice according to the current season.

Upon returning to the United States, I soon started my Master's program in Occupational Therapy. A program heavy in pediatrics, we learned the foundations of Sensory Processing Disorder (which I and many other therapists now prefer to call Sensory Processing differences) and of this disorder's implications in a child's ability to learn, self-regulate, and function in age-appropriate environments such as school and home. My training in sensory processing continued into my professional fieldwork and placement in a pediatric outpatient clinic, where I would eventually accept my first job as a pediatric OT. While I loved and adored the clinic, the therapists, and the children we worked with, by the end of my 8-9 hour days, I, myself, was utterly exhausted and overstimulated by my surroundings. It was at this point, I began to miss the open-air teaching environments of my past. I also wondered about how these busy environments impacted our patients' sensory systems.

When one of my former clinical instructors opened her own clinic, I followed her and began working in this new outpatient pediatric clinic. This clinic, on the outskirts of north San Antonio, was in a professional strip mall that backed to a greenbelt space. Behind the clinic was an open space dotted with live oaks, with swings that could be hung from a sturdy oak. I began regularly taking my after-school patients out there- we would practice drawing our letters in the dirt with sticks, complete mini obstacle courses balancing on rocks as stepping stones, or bring out different activities with us. I found that for the children demonstrated low frustration tolerance, perhaps because they struggled the most with fine motor tasks, handwriting, practicing visual motor tasks, they were able to more easily work through their moments of frustration and engage more readily with the skill. The children who came into the practice already overstimulated from their classrooms, could reach and maintain a calm and steady state of sensory regulation more quickly. It is in this calm and self-regulated state that a child can learn and develop their skills most effectively, so reaching this state is imperative to effective therapy.

During all this professional development, my husband and I were also building a family of our own. Right before our fourth child was born, and right after the world shut down due to Covid, my husband was offered a job back in Austin, allowing us to relocate back to the city where we originated. Like others, we began curing our cabin fever with family hikes on the greenbelt, lake swims, and wading in overflowing creek beds (it was particularly rainy that year, remember?). This was the environment that invited us in, as the world of the indoors remained closed.

My own formal introduction to the emerging practice of Nature-based OT occurred when I learned of it though a former coworker friend who had moved to Minnesota and began her own Nature-based occupational therapy business. I remember clicking through her photos with such sheer excitement for its actual existence and acceptance into the therapy world. This was what I too had wanted to do. The more I researched, the more evidence I found to support what my intuition had said from the start- that nature-based therapy programs not only serve as a positive, sensory-rich environment for children, but that nature itself can have profound cognitive, social, and wellness benefits for the child, thus serving as a profound therapeutic tool which can be combined with more traditional occupational therapy approaches.

My research into nature-based OT would continue, as well as professional continuing education coupled with over a year of general business planning. And voila - This is how I developed Dandelion Kids Therapy Services - it is a program that I am both excited and passionate about in sharing with our community here in Austin.