My Mission as a Writer

What does it mean to have a mission? Does every career have a mission or does one simply go to work, get a paycheck, and go on with life?

I am a pediatric occupational therapist (OT), and I have been in the therapy game since 2011 (2010 really if I count my fieldwork months). I love OT. It’s an amazing profession. Helping people to either gain or rehabilitate skills to live their lives to the fullest is a beautiful mission. I have always loved the moments where I get to watch a child feel proud because he or she accomplished something meaningful, whether it was getting dressed without help, tying shoes, writing his or her name, or even just finally being able to wear that school uniform that used to feel so uncomfortable.

However, in my experience as an OT in pediatrics, the common denominator that contributed to all those successes was parent education. While the hands-on time with my patients was incredibly valuable, it was not the primary component that made the child succeed. It was the parents taking the therapy skills they learned and using them at home daily.

Sometimes, progress was made easily with just a few sessions of coaching a parent in making simple changes to the family’s daily routine. One such case was with a child who was three years old and showing signs of autism. He was a smart little rascal but had a very difficult time with “behavior.” I put that in quotations because it is seldom just “behavior” but more likely some sort of dysregulation in the body.

During our first session, I talked to the child’s mother about his sleep. She reported that he cannot fall asleep very well at night and wakes frequently. Aha! Sleep is a huge culprit in emotional dysregulation. After doing some digging, his mother revealed that he falls asleep every night watching movies. As an OT that has taken many courses in sleep hygiene, I knew we needed to talk about removing the tv from his bedtime routine. His mother agreed to try it but was not convinced he would tolerate it. She came back to therapy the following week and said, “I don’t know how it worked this well, but it was like magic!” Putting the child on a screen-free bedtime routine within days had him falling asleep easily and sleeping through the night. His mother also reported a huge decrease in emotional meltdowns.

I had case after case exactly like the one I just described, and I found myself getting frustrated at the lack of awareness parents had about screen exposure before bedtime. Every time I had a parent commit to changing the routine and removing the screen, the child’s sleep and behavior would improve. Every. Time. I wanted to find ways to get information like this out to more families. All of it can be found via a quick google search, but I wondered why more people were not aware of it.

Further along in my career, there were more topics that gave me the same urgency. People need this information! How can I get practical evidence-based information out there so that fewer children will struggle with sensory difficulties, poor sleep, and emotional dysregulation? That was when I began thinking of writing.

As I pursue this career of health content writing, I feel that my mission is two-fold: to expand education to more families about simple changes that can strongly impact child development but also to ensure that the information is based on the most up-to-date research to ensure accuracy.

The amount of misinformation out there targeting parents of special needs children as well as those that are typically developing is alarming. Some of this misinformation is even predatory in nature in that it promises “cures” and “fixes” but at a very high price tag. In the end, it does not make any change other than to chip away at an already exhausted parent’s hope (and pocketbook for that matter).

For me, this fact is enough to propel me into this career where I can counteract misinformation and provide information that actually does make a difference in the lives of families. Sometimes, that is the difference between an empowered parent helping a child reach his full potential and an overly taxed parent giving up.

That is my mission as a writer, and, if I am being honest, it has always been my mission as a medical professional. Is making a difference in people’s lives not everyone’s mission? We just all go about it in our own way. My way is through writing.