Podcast

e059 – The Part-Time Jungle Podcast: Your Child’s Story with Sabrina Adair

June 7, 2022
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Tiana Fech

What is the best way to understand and communicate with our child? Sometimes it may feel like they are not listening or are trying to purposely make us upset, but that simply isn’t always the case. What is key is understanding our child’s story.

Joining me for this conversation is Sabrina Adair, M.Sc.O.T., a practicing occupational therapist, passionate advocate for parent empowerment, and the author of Understanding a Child the Occupational Therapy Way: Recognizing and Communicating the Unique Potential of a Child (2021). She is a mom of four beautiful children who have taught her patience, perseverance, and compassion and that we’re all wonderfully unique individuals with our own unfolding stories.

Sabrina’s experience working with children has inspired her drive for innovation and inter-professional collaboration. In 2019, she founded Enabling Adaptations, a private therapy company focused on helping parents and caregivers to find ways to effectively understand and communicate their child’s needs in order to create positive environments where children can reach their greatest potential.

Sabrina is an award-winning entrepreneur and shares her successful approach to improving children’s lives at speaking engagements, parenting workshops, and more. Sabrina holds a post-professional Master of Science in Occupational Therapy from Dalhousie University and a Bachelor of Science in Occupational Therapy from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Sabrina resides just outside Toronto, Ontario, with her husband and children.

Listen in as we talk about:

Living by ‘the schedule’. Sabrina shares that with four busy kids, activities, and lives, living by their schedule is what keeps them on track every week.
How to better understand your children and their stories. Sabrina explains how as parents, we need to start by understanding ourselves in order to understand our children.
Being curious with your children. For Sabrina, the key is having this curiosity with our children. It gives us more time to pause instead of making rash and judgmental decisions.
Strategies to help communicate your child’s story to other people. Sometimes our kids have things going on within them that other people can’t comprehend. When we can listen to our children and understand them better, we can help them communicate their stories to others.

Connect with Sabrina:

Instagram: @enablingadaptations https://www.instagram.com/enablingadaptations/
Facebook: @enablingadaptations https://www.facebook.com/enablingadaptations/
Website: https://www.enablingadaptations.com
Book: Understanding a Child the Occupational Therapy Way: Recognizing and Communicating the Unique Potential of a Child by Sabrina Adair https://enablingadaptations.com/resources/my-book/

Connect with Tiana and The Part-Time Jungle Community:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parttimejungle/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/parttimejungle/
Website: https://theparttimejungle.com

LIVE BY THE SCHEDULE

Sabrina explains, as most moms can relate, her kids have busy schedules packed with lots of activities! She shares how she lives by her family’s schedule that’s pre-planned out. This way, she knows who is doing what, who is going where, and when she has that schedule set up, she blocks her business into the gaps. She shares the strategy that works for her, which is to dedicate specific times for each specific task. This helps her batch her time and work as an entrepreneur, while still spending quality time with her kids.

HOW TO BETTER UNDERSTAND YOUR CHILD’S STORY

“You need to start by understanding yourself in order to understand your children.”

Sabrina explains how as parents, we need to start by understanding ourselves in order to understand our children. Knowing where our own stories come from is essential to understanding that of our children. She shares how we each have stories that are ingrained in us, more often than not from before we are even born. How we navigate and understand these stories for ourselves is crucial to understanding our kids.

BEING CURIOUS WITH YOUR CHILDREN

“When you’re curious about your child, you can take their overwhelm and break it down into manageable pieces.”

For Sabrina, the key is having this curiosity with children. She explains that when we take the time to be curious and ask questions in a meaningful way, it gives us more time to pause instead of making rash and judgmental decisions. There is always a reason as to why our children act and respond in the way that they do. Having patience

COMMUNICATING YOUR CHILD’S STORY TO OTHER PEOPLE

Sometimes our kids have things going on within them that other people can’t comprehend. Maybe they get overwhelmed with loud noises, don’t like when too many people are asking something of them at the same time, or feel out of place at school. Sabrina shares her strategies for understanding our kids and then in turn communicating their story or helping them to communicate their own story to other people. When we can listen to our children and understand them better, we can better communicate their needs to others.

BEG, BORROW, & STEAL FROM SABRINA

Go-to meal on a busy night: Soup
Favourite family activity: Camping and being outside or Uno
Favourite podcast: How I Built This
Favourite book: Talking to Strangers by Malcom Gladwell or The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Who Sabrina would love to sit down with: Moms with grown kids

IMPORTANT PODCAST UPDATE:

As you will hear in this episode, the last episode of The Part-Time Jungle Podcast will be released towards the end of June. In the fall, I will be launching a new podcast called “The People Teaching People Podcast“. It will be a place to talk about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of teaching and learning in a world where there is always more to discover.

I have so many mixed emotions in making this change. The connections, conversations, and sense of community that have come from The Part-Time Jungle Podcast have been incredible. However, it is the right time for a shift that aligns with my passion for education and the work that I am doing as an educator and course development consultant.

Thank you so much for listening and for being a part of The Part-Time Jungle community.

Wishing you all the best with your motherhood and work juggle!

~Tiana