Participation of Children With Physical Disabilities in Everyday Occupations

This chapter describes a program of research over the past 20 years focused on understanding the participation of children with disabilities in everyday occupations. The research started from our curiosity about why participation might be different and has grown to include a focus on what could be changed to improve levels of participation. Participation has been defined by the World Health Organization ([WHO] 2001) as a person’s involvement in life situations and includes the activities of personal maintenance, mobility, social relationships, education, leisure, spirituality, and community life. Coster and Khetani (2008) link the concepts inherent in occupational science in defining participation as “sets of organized sequences of activities directed toward a personally or socially meaningful goal” (p. 643).