A center for occupational and physical therapy for kids ages 0 to 12 — Wonder Kids — opened last month on Jay and Hudson on the ground floor with several rooms for sensory play and fine and gross motor therapy.

Owner Blanche Buchwald has been a therapist for 26 years — she got her master’s at NYU — and has worked in private practice as well as hospitals and schools for decades. But six years ago she opened a sensory gym in the basement of her house in Bergenfield, NJ, and it organically grew into her own private practice; she now has three other locations.

“I had a bunch of Tribeca clients in Chelsea who were literally begging me to come here so they could walk!” Blanche said. “I was looking for the perfect spot for some time and then found this.”

Blanche has 30 therapists working for her and splits her own time between three locations. And she loves the work — much of which has been informed by her own experience as a parent of five. The business submits insurance bills for parents and in some cases files single-case in-network agreements for both PT and OT (this location does not have speech therapy at this time).

Sadly, she said, issues of anxiety and emotional regulation continue to be prevalent in today’s kids.

“It’s a very fast-paced world,” she said. “Information is being thrown at kids all the time, putting them into fight or flight a lot more.” Her rooms are designed to allow sensory input to flood a child’s system with serotonin so they can “rest and digest.”

“Kids so easily go into the red zone,” she said — and she thinks environments for kids have really changed in the past three years. “If your brain is so distracted by dysregulation, then you can’t get to higher-level thinking, like language acquisition. Regulation is the foundation of attention. And for some kids, the alarm bells are going off all the time.”

I am thinking we could all use some time in the ball pit…

Wonder Kids Therapy Center
3 Jay | Hudson & Staple
officemanager@wonderkidstc.com
201-305-3326