PediatricDigest: October 2025

Friday, 31 October 2025

co-regulation, tinkering, & cutie faces 🎃

October 2025 Newsletter

Hi read,

Hope you're enjoying the fall season! It has been a busy one at OKOT this year, which is why this October newsletter is BARELY making it out to you in the month of October. 😁

As always, here are some helpful tips and resources to make daily life easier and more joyful for your family!

☀️ Recommended Resource-of-the-Month:

Have you heard the word "co-regulation"? It is a popular buzz word in OT right now. And for good reason! Co-regulation refers to the process of helping your child to regulate their emotions by YOU (the adult) regulating your own emotions. (No one is perfect-- you WILL make mistakes!) But once you understand this concept and begin to practice it, you'll have a deeper connection with your child. Here's a sweet animated video that illustrates co-regulation well.

💚 OT Tip-of-the-Month for More Joy & Ease in Daily Life

Try gathering materials you'd normally recycle like cardboard, paper tubes, and containers and work together to build something fun such as a robot, a monster, or even part of a Halloween costume. Keep scissors, duct tape, and string nearby to help bring ideas to life. Building with open-ended materials encourages imagination, motor skills, and planning while offering a free, screen-free way to connect.

(And if you're in the East Bay, one of our OKOT parents let us know about the Tinker Faire happening at Aurora School in Oakland on Saturday, November 8th! It's a free event where your child can experiment with all kinds of open-ended play activities.)

🌳 OKOT Story & Service Updates

It's always a challenge to teach children about emotions in a fun and playful way, without it feeling like "work" or "practice" for them. Many years ago during my Halloween day group, I brought some mandarins for us for snack…and right before group I had an idea to draw faces on them to play a guessing game with the children about what feelings these little cuties might be feeling. It was a hit…and fostered lots of great conversation about how we can manage our own emotions when we feel big feelings. (I always wish I would have had a black sharpie to make them look more Halloween…but the purple one was what I had on me at the time!) 😁

OKOT Service Updates:

We have had LOTS of changes this month! We have grown into a big-girl business this year and we needed more admin help to ensure that we can reply quickly to administrative requests. (THANK YOU for your patience with us this fall!)

Olivia Menser will be our new full-time Client Care Coordinator. She'll be doing all of our parent inquiry calls, admin support for our current families, and doing all of our therapy placements. (Hannah Faulhaber was doing this role very part-time; she is trainsitioning to be our CFO's assistant, helping with billing/finances.)

Rona Cacao has joined us as our full-time Administrative Assistant, doing all the admin work behind-the-scenes that helps OKOT run smoothly (staffing, permitting, student coordination, and more!).

Unfortunately, we had a therapist in our East Bay location who had to resign for personal reasons this fall. We've hired 2 fabulous OTs- Jasmine Reynoso (full-time M-F) and Christine Lam (part-time Saturdays) to open more times for therapy in our groups and 1:1 spots for your children in the East Bay.

If you're interested in services for your child:

You can check out our 1:1 services here.

You can check out our group services here.

If you have already applied, current applications are being reviewed and spots offered based on availability and needs of the child and group. (Now that we've hired Olivia full-time, we expect the wait time to drastically reduce for how quickly we can process applications for services!) 🙌

Happy Halloween!

Laura Park Figueroa

Founder, OKOT

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2930 Domingo Avenue #1092
Berkeley, California 94705, USA

Latest from Food Politics: Trick or Treat: Happy Halloween Candy!

By Marion Nestle

October 31 2025

Trick or Treat: Happy Halloween Candy!

Halloween, no matter its origins and promotion of costumes, means only one thing to the candy industry: sales.

And plenty of detailed research helps that along.

America’s Halloween Sweet Tooth: Instacart’s 2025 Candy & Decor Trends: Who loads up on candy the most? Since Utah’s first full year on the Instacart platform, Utah has once again decisively claimed the crown, buying candy 50% more often than the national average in October 2024.

And if you ever wondered which candies sell best?

Selling Halloween candy

Halloween scare: Candy costs are soaring: Trick-or-treaters may get fewer sweets this year as high cocoa prices haunt the candy aisle.
Halloween candy sales soar: Trends & treats driving growth: Halloween is no longer just for kids, it’s a confectionery goldmine… Read more
Confectionery market to hit $278bn by 2032 as candy sales surge: The confectionery market is entering a new growth phase, driven by evolving consumer preferences, seasonal demand, and innovation in non-chocolate formats… Read more
No trick: Halloween 2025 candy sales to hit record highs: After Summerween comes the real deal: Halloween, which expects to see recording spending… Read more

Enjoy!

The post Trick or Treat: Happy Halloween Candy! appeared first on Food Politics by Marion Nestle

Coming Soon: What to Eat Now

My new book What to Eat Now is a field guide to food shopping in America, and a treatise on how to eat well and deliciously.

Forthcoming November 11, 2025

For more information and pre-orders, click here.

You can explore the full archive of this (almost) daily blog at foodpolitics.com, where you'll also find information about my books, articles, media interviews, upcoming lectures, favorite resources, and FAQs.