TheraPeeps delivers mobile pediatric occupational therapy to families in Santa Cruz, coming directly to your home, your child’s school, or outdoor settings like Henry Cowell Redwoods and Natural Bridges State Beach. No clinic. No commute over Highway 17. No disruption to your child’s daily routine.

Our founder, Brooke Olson, OTR/L, holds SIPT and STAR certification in sensory integration and is DIR/Floortime therapy trained with over a decade of clinical experience. Our approach is developmental and relationship-based. We do not use compliance-based methods. We follow your child’s lead, build on their strengths, and work alongside your family in the environments where your child actually lives and plays.

TheraPeeps brings the full range of pediatric occupational therapy services directly to families in Santa Cruz. We come to you, and we design every session around your child’s unique developmental profile. Services we provide include:

• DIR/Floortime, our lead service in Santa Cruz, following your child’s emotional and developmental lead to build connection, communication, and regulation
• Sensory Processing and Sensory Integration Therapy (SIPT and STAR certified)
• Emotional and Self-Regulation support, our most-requested service across all families we serve
• Feeding Therapy using the SOS (Sequential Oral Sensory) Approach, for picky eating, food refusal, and mealtime stress
• Fine Motor, Handwriting, and Pre-Writing Skills
• Gross Motor and Coordination Development
• Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), dressing, toileting, sleep routines
• Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP), a nervous system intervention supporting auditory processing and regulation
• Nature-based therapeutic playgroups, small-group sessions in outdoor settings that leverage Santa Cruz’s remarkable natural environments
• Developmental Evaluations and Consultations for children ages 0-8

Families come to us with a wide range of questions and concerns, and the support we offer reflects that range. Some children have a diagnosis; many do not. We work with children across the full developmental spectrum, and we never require a label to begin. We commonly support children and families navigating:

• Sensory Processing Differences (sensory seeking, sensory avoidance, or mixed profiles)
• Autism, we are Board Certified in Autism and committed to a neuro-affirming, non-ABA framework
• Anxiety and emotional dysregulation, including meltdowns, rigidity, and difficulty with transitions
• ADHD and attention or impulse-control challenges
• Developmental Delays (motor, language, social-emotional)
• Feeding difficulties, extreme picky eating, and mealtime-related anxiety
• Fine motor delays affecting handwriting, scissors, and self-care
• Hypotonia (low muscle tone) and coordination challenges
• Auditory processing sensitivities
• Early childhood trauma and nervous system dysregulation
• Twice-exceptional (2e) children whose strengths and challenges often go unrecognized in traditional settings

Call us: (650) 204-0677

TheraPeeps brings clinical depth and a genuinely non-pathologizing framework directly to Santa Cruz families. Here is what that looks like in practice.

• Neuro-affirming, relationship-based practice. We do not use ABA methods, and our goals are never about making your child look more typical. Our DIR/Floortime and STAR-certified sensory integration approach follows your child’s lead, building foundational regulation and connection.
• We come to you. Sessions happen in your home, your child’s preschool or daycare, or agreed-upon outdoor spaces in Santa Cruz. Highway 17 to a Peninsula clinic is a 45-minute drive on a good day. We remove that barrier entirely.
• Nature-based therapeutic groups. We run small-group sessions in outdoor settings that use natural sensory environments, movement, and unstructured play. Santa Cruz’s coastal and redwood environments support this work directly.
• Specialized credentials. SIPT and STAR certification, DIR/Floortime training with 10+ years of experience, SOS Approach to Feeding, Safe and Sound Protocol, and Board Certification in Autism. Our team brings specialized depth across each of these methods.
• 20+ years of combined clinical experience. You work with experienced clinicians, not a franchise or staffing agency.

TheraPeeps is a private-pay practice. We provide detailed superbills after each session that you can submit to your insurance carrier for potential out-of-network reimbursement. PPO plans held by UCSC faculty, staff, and researchers, as well as employees at Bay Area tech and biotech firms who live in Santa Cruz County, often include out-of-network benefits. If you are not sure whether your plan covers OON services, we can walk you through what to look for. Reimbursement rates vary by plan and we cannot guarantee a specific outcome, but we want you to have every tool available to make quality OT accessible for your family.

Call us: (650) 204-0677

We prefer a holistic, non-pathologizing approach to our child’s care, how does TheraPeeps fit with that philosophy?

We were built for families who think this way. TheraPeeps uses a developmental, relationship-based model rooted in DIR/Floortime and neuro-affirming sensory integration, frameworks that treat your child’s differences as meaningful, not as deficits to be corrected. We do not use ABA or compliance-based methods. We do not believe the goal of therapy is to make your child look neurotypical. Our goal is to help your child build the internal capacity to engage with the world in a way that works for them, and to strengthen the connection between your child and your family along the way. If you have spent time looking for a provider who shares those values, you are in the right place.

Can sessions happen outdoors, near the beach, in the redwoods, or in other natural spaces in Santa Cruz?

Yes, and we genuinely love this aspect of working with Santa Cruz families. Nature is one of the most powerful therapeutic environments available to us, rich in sensory input, opportunities for unstructured movement, and the kind of co-regulation that happens naturally when children and caregivers are outside together. Depending on your child’s goals and what makes clinical sense, we can work with you to incorporate outdoor settings into your child’s plan of care. We also run nature-based therapeutic groups that are specifically designed around outdoor environments. Sessions always begin with a clinical conversation about what will best serve your child, and for many kids, the answer includes grass, sand, and open sky.

How is TheraPeeps different from county programs like San Andreas Regional Center or Early Start services?

San Andreas Regional Center (SARC) and Early Start are valuable public programs, and we encourage families to pursue every resource available to them, including those. What we offer is meaningfully different. Regional center and Early Start services are eligibility-based, which means your child must meet specific criteria to qualify, and the services provided are determined by the IEP or IFSP process, not by your family’s individual priorities. Wait times can also be long. TheraPeeps is a private-pay practice, which means we are available to families whose children do not meet regional center thresholds, families who want more intensive or specialized services than the public system can provide, or families who simply want a different approach. Our DIR/Floortime and SIPT-certified sensory integration work in particular goes deeper than what most county programs offer.

My child is 18 months old and I have some early concerns, is it too soon to reach out?

Absolutely not. In Santa Cruz, access to early intervention specialists can be surprisingly limited: pediatricians often have long wait lists for referrals, regional center eligibility thresholds leave many families without support, and clinic-based providers require travel that is hard to sustain with a toddler. The birth-to-three window is a period of remarkable neurological development, and in-home early intervention removes the barriers that so often delay that access. You do not need a diagnosis, a referral, or even certainty that something is wrong. If you have a concern about your child’s sensory responses, motor development, feeding, or social-emotional engagement, reaching out early is the right move. We serve children from birth through age eight, and some of our most meaningful work happens with families of very young children who simply had a question and made the call.

Do you serve families throughout Santa Cruz County, or only certain neighborhoods?

We serve families across Santa Cruz and the surrounding region. Because we are a mobile practice with roots in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are well-positioned to serve families in Santa Cruz, Capitola, Aptos, Scotts Valley, and the broader county, particularly those connected to UCSC, local school communities, or the tech and biotech corridor whose employees live in Santa Cruz and commute to the Peninsula. Please call us at (650) 204-0677 to discuss your location and current availability. We do our best to build schedules that make sense geographically so that travel time never comes at the expense of quality care.