For the last year or so our daughter has been involved in riding therapy. I can’t even quite remember what made us look into riding therapy to begin with, check only that our daughter who is quite fearful of many things, drugs seemed to really love horses. For some reason she was completely drawn to these huge creatures. Please don’t ask her to ride along for a car wash, sales but a ride on a horse? yes please!
It didn’t take too much searching to find an excellent therapeutic riding facility in our area. I contacted the owner and explained a bit about our daughter, she said she had great success with children with Apraxia. We have seen Leah grow in many ways this past year. She truly has a love of horses. What started initially as a different way to work on some of her quirks, quickly has become a passion.
While there isn’t a lot of hard science, at least that I have been able to find, on hippotherapy and how it helps children with Apraxia, we have seen the improvements. Riding has given her more self-confidence, increased her core strength, and encouraged her speech. Within a few weeks of starting therapy we noticed that it really gave her extra things to talk about. She wanted to talk about her riding lesson and talk about what was coming up for the next week.
We took a short break from speech therapy, and when we resumed speech, her therapist noticed right away that her core was stronger. She could still more stable in her chair for a longer period of time. She also, of course, noticed that she was using many more words than the last time she was at speech therapy.
We look forward to watching Leah continue to grow in both her devotion to horses and her speech!
Leave a Reply