Occupational therapy is the broad profession
Occupational therapy addresses a wide range of skills that support a child's functional independence: fine and gross motor abilities, self-care tasks like dressing and feeding, handwriting, play skills, and participation in daily routines at home and school. An occupational therapist works across all of these areas, tailoring the focus to whatever a specific child actually needs.
Sensory integration is a specific approach within OT
Sensory integration therapy (SIT) is a treatment approach, sometimes called a "frame of reference," that sits inside occupational therapy rather than beside it. It was developed by Dr. A. Jean Ayres, herself an occupational therapist, in the 1960s, based on the theory that how a child's brain organises and interprets sensory input, touch, movement, sound, and body awareness, shapes their ability to respond adaptively to their environment.
In practice, SIT is delivered by an occupational therapist (sometimes a physiotherapist) as one of several tools within a broader OT session, not as a separate service booked instead of OT. A child receiving sensory integration therapy is, in a real sense, receiving a specific style of occupational therapy.
What sensory integration therapy actually involves
SIT techniques include things like therapeutic swinging to provide vestibular input, deep-pressure activities such as squeezing or weighted input, tactile play with different textures, and proprioception-focused exercises like jumping, climbing, or balance work. The core skills targeted include sensory modulation (how a child responds to sensory input), discrimination, postural control, praxis (planning and executing movement), and bilateral coordination.
When sensory integration is the right focus
Sensory integration approaches are commonly used for children with autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, sensory processing differences, developmental coordination disorder, and related profiles where difficulty processing sensory input is a central concern, alongside broader developmental delays. If your child's main challenges show up as sensory-seeking or sensory-avoidant behaviour, difficulty with transitions, or strong reactions to textures, sounds, or movement, a sensory-integration-focused OT approach is likely to be part of the plan.
When broader occupational therapy is the focus
If your child's primary needs are around daily-living skills, handwriting, self-care independence, or general fine and gross motor development without a strong sensory-processing component, occupational therapy may draw less heavily on sensory-integration techniques and more on other parts of the OT toolkit, task adaptation, skill-building, and environmental strategies.
In practice, most children referred for OT receive some blend of both, since sensory processing and functional skill-building are rarely entirely separate in a young child's development.
What to ask a provider
Rather than asking "OT or sensory integration," a more useful question is: what specifically is my child's assessment showing, and which parts of the OT toolkit does that call for? Ask whether sensory integration techniques will form part of the sessions, what specific goals they're targeting, and how progress in that area will be measured and communicated to you.
What this means for a therapy trip
On a multidisciplinary block, sensory integration work is typically folded into the occupational therapy sessions rather than scheduled as a separate discipline, unless your child's assessment specifically calls for a heavier sensory-integration focus. Understanding this beforehand helps you interpret a proposed programme correctly, "OT sessions" in a package description likely already includes sensory-integration techniques where relevant, rather than requiring it to be requested separately.
