Occupational Therapy: What Makes Us Human?

To be human is to be occupational. Occupation is evident in the evolutionary history of mankind and is seen as a biological imperative. Whether occupation is used as a form or survival, or a way of bringing meaning into everyday life, it is what makes us human (Dickie, 2009). To define occupation is far more complex than we believe. Human occupations are intricate. One must consider how an individual spends their time, their motivation, their influences and the context of which occupation occurs (Christiansen and Townsend, 2010). We must also consider the skills needed to complete the task and the influences of the environment around us. Engaging in occupations provide meaning and purpose into our lives. According to Hagedorn (2000), the focus of occupational therapy is to engage individuals in these meaningful, productive occupations in the three areas of our domain, which are productivity, leisure and self-care. Understanding humans as occupational beings is therefore crucial for the occupational therapy profession as we base our client-centred care off our understandings. In order for us to engage others in meaningful occupations, we must first have a good understanding of occupation ourselves. According to Wilcock (1998), there are four core concepts of

In Occupational Therapy, playing games are essential for children as it is their way of learning about the world and it engages them in the same way that adults engage in world (Parham and Fazio, 2008). Like occupation, games are a difficult concept to define as there are so many interpretations of the concept and there are many different forms that games take. Playing games is an important occupation that allows us to be occupational beings through the four concepts of do, be, become and belong. I will further discuss these concepts and highlight examples of the significance of