ARK's Blog

A school day asks a lot of a body. Sit still, stay quiet, track a voice at the front of the room, tune out twenty-two other people doing twenty-two other things, then get up, move through a loud hallway, and do it again. For plenty of students that's manageable. For plenty of others it takes real effort to hold together, and the effort has to go somewhere. . . That's usually what you're seeing …

Fingernails. The inside of your cheek. A pen cap. A plastic water bottle cap. If you've spent a lot of your life reaching for something to bite or chew, you've probably heard it called an oral fixation - it's a familiar phrase, even if you've never used it yourself. What most people don't know is that there's a whole category of tools built specifically for an oral fixation in chewing. We often ca …

If chewing and ADHD seem to go together, you're not imagining it. It's one of the most common things we hear about, whether someone is ordering for their child, a loved one, or for themselves. It can show up in a lot of different ways depending on what's within reach. Wet shirt collars. Flattened pen caps. Hoodie strings, pencil erasers, headphone cords, a game controller with teeth marks on the g …

Chewing as Communication and Regulation Chewing is often one of the first things parents notice and wonder about. It shows up in different ways across development and can feel confusing when it suddenly increases or decreases without a clear reason. From the lens of a pediatric occupational therapist, chewing is not random or simply a habit to eliminate. It is communication. It is regulation. And …