Matt Mielnick is a Pediatric Occupational Therapist in private practice with 20 years of experience working with young children, providing evaluation and treatment services, in New York and Massachusetts.
He really got my kid. It makes sense. I get it now, - every parent's response after a Matt Mielnick OT evaluation. As the director of the preschool evaluation program who assigned Matt to assess hundreds of our active, anxious, sometimes checked out little ones, my job was made easier because of the confidence I had in his ability to clarify to parents what was happening with their child. He made me proud to be part of the process. -- Tina Wells, M.S. S.A.S. District Administrator NYC DOE Mr. Mielnick evaluated my son for OT services through the Department of Ed Pre-school program. Throughout that process I was impressed with his unique insight into my son's sensory issues and his ability to communicate that information in non-clinical language. His report has helped educators and therapists to position my son for greater success in school. -- Angela Bankson, Parent In this book, Matt Mielnick lends a voice born from countless evaluations of young children struggling with sensory processing difficulties, as well as from innumerable discussions with parents who themselves are struggling to understand their children's often baffling behaviors, and how to best respond to them. Recognizing that there are rarely simple answers to explain complex issues, [Mielnick] strives to give us something to work with by explaining the brain-body relationship and taking us on a tour of the sensory system so we can begin to grasp the method to the madness at hand, recognize the stress it places not only on the child but the family as a whole, and begin to put strategies in place to help the child increase their availability for learning and more adaptively interact with their environment. -- Michele Kohler LCSW, Evaluation Unit Supervisor at New York League for Early Learning The author is a Pediatric Occupational Therapist specializing in working with young children and in this book he aims to provide information that is easy for parents and professionals to understand, rather than an academic publication... Mielnik writes in a style that uses metaphors and images and some extended case studies to illustrate the evaluation process with specific children... A very useful introduction to this field. -- Mary Mountstephen