OT Workshop: Parenting and Teaching Through a Sensory Lens
Price range: R300,00 through R350,00
This workshop is for Occupational Therapists only. You must enter your OT HPCSA registration number below to purchase the course.
Course features:
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Gain a deeper understanding of how your own sensory processing affects your interactions with children, enhancing your parenting and teaching skills.
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Learn practical strategies to improve your self-regulation and emotional attunement, leading to calmer and more connected family and classroom environments.
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Discover the importance of co-regulation and how your level of emotional regulation can positively impact the children’s behaviour and learning.
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Engage with a unique perspective that emphasizes adult sensory needs, enabling you to cultivate greater self-awareness and compassion in your role as a caregiver or educator.
How Your Sensory Health Affects Your Parenting & Teaching
Understanding your nervous system so you can respond, regulate and connect with children more intentionally
Whether you're a parent trying to navigate the demands of family life or a teacher supporting a classroom full of children, you are constantly using your nervous system. Every conversation, behaviour, decision, transition and emotional interaction places sensory demands on your brain and body.
Yet while we spend so much time learning how to support children's regulation, behaviour and learning, we rarely stop to consider the role our own sensory processing plays.
This practical and thought-provoking course explores an often-overlooked truth: adults have sensory needs too.
Drawing on sensory integration theory, neuroscience and real-life experiences from home and the classroom, this course will help you understand how your own sensory profile influences the way you respond to stress, connect with children, regulate your emotions and make decisions under pressure.
Rather than focusing only on children's sensory differences, this course turns the lens inward—because the most powerful support we can offer children begins with understanding ourselves.
Throughout the course, Gina Rencken and Elize Janse van Rensburg unpack why both parenting and teaching are fundamentally sensory occupations, requiring constant regulation, flexibility, emotional attunement and connection. You'll discover why some days feel effortless while others leave you overwhelmed, exhausted or reacting in ways that don't reflect the parent or teacher you want to be.
Together we'll explore:
- Why every adult is a sensory being.
- How your sensory system influences your emotions, attention, energy and relationships.
- Why teaching and parenting place such high sensory demands on the nervous system.
- The difference between self-regulation and co-regulation.
- How your level of regulation directly influences the children in your care.
- Recognising your own sensory strengths, vulnerabilities and triggers.
- Practical strategies for supporting your own regulation throughout the day.
- Building calmer classrooms, stronger relationships and more connected families by starting with yourself.
This course is not about becoming the "perfect" parent or teacher. It is about developing greater self-awareness, self-compassion and practical tools that allow you to respond with intention rather than simply reacting to the demands around you.
When adults feel regulated, children feel safer.
When adults feel connected, children are better able to learn, grow and thrive.
Whether you are an educator, therapist, parent or caregiver, this course will leave you with a deeper understanding of yourself, a fresh perspective on children's behaviour, and practical strategies you can begin using immediately.
Who should attend?
- Teachers
- Parents and caregivers
- Occupational Therapists
- Speech-Language Therapists
- Psychologists
- Counsellors
- Early Childhood Practitioners
- Anyone working closely with children