Most pediatric therapy clinics do one thing. Maybe two. You find a good occupational therapist across town, a speech therapist somewhere else, and if your child needs physical therapy on top of that, you’re adding a third stop to an already packed week. For parents of kids with complex needs, that kind of scheduling juggling act gets old fast. It’s exhausting, it’s time-consuming, and it can make it harder to keep track of whether your child is actually making progress across all those different providers.
Strides Pediatric Therapy in Eagle Mountain, UT does things differently. They’ve built a full-service clinic where families can access occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy, mental health therapy, recreational therapy, feeding therapy, and adaptive riding all in one place. One location, one team, one less thing to coordinate. For many Utah families, that alone is worth paying attention to.
Care Offered at Strides Pediatric Therapy
Occupational Therapy
OT at Strides is focused on the practical stuff — helping kids build the skills they need for everyday life. Fine motor development, sensory processing, self-care, school readiness. The therapists use play and purposeful activity to work toward independence in the areas that matter most to each individual child and family. It’s not about hitting generic milestones. It’s about figuring out what this specific child needs to function and participate more fully in their own life.
Physical Therapy
Physical therapy here looks at how a child moves through the environments that are part of their actual life. Home, school, the playground. PTs work on motor development, coordination, balance, and mobility with the bigger picture in mind. The goal isn’t just improving a metric in a clinical setting. It’s helping kids do the things they want and need to do out in the real world, with their family and their peers.
Speech Therapy
The speech-language pathologists at Strides work with kids across a pretty wide range of needs. Communication delays, language development, oral motor challenges, feeding and swallowing difficulties, hearing-related concerns. If a family has been noticing their child struggling to communicate or falling behind in language development, this is often one of the first places to start. Early intervention in this area can make a significant difference, and having it available alongside other therapies under the same roof makes the coordination that much easier.
Mental Health Therapy
This is an area where Strides stands out from a lot of pediatric clinics. They offer individual sessions for kids, family therapy, and support groups for parents. Because honestly, the challenges a child is navigating don’t happen in a vacuum. The whole family feels it. Siblings are affected. Parents carry an enormous amount. Having mental health support built into the same practice as the rest of a child’s care is something a lot of families don’t realize they need until they have it, and then it becomes one of the most valued parts of the whole arrangement.
Strides also uses equine-facilitated psychotherapy as one option within their mental health services, bringing a horse into the session as a therapeutic partner. It’s not the right fit for every child, but for some kids the presence of an animal changes the dynamic of a therapy session in ways that are hard to replicate any other way.
Recreational Therapy
Recreational therapy is a good fit for kids who check out the moment something feels clinical. It uses activity-based interventions to build skills, independence, and wellbeing in ways that don’t always look like traditional therapy from the outside. For the right child, it can open doors that other approaches haven’t. The focus is on developing health, wellbeing, and quality of life through meaningful activities, which sounds simple but can be genuinely transformative for kids who haven’t connected with more conventional therapeutic settings.
Feeding Therapy
Feeding difficulties are something a lot of families quietly struggle with and don’t always know where to turn. Picky eating that goes beyond typical childhood preferences, aversions rooted in sensory processing challenges, oral motor difficulties, swallowing concerns — these things affect mealtimes, nutrition, and family life in ways that ripple out into everything else. Strides addresses these challenges as part of their broader commitment to serving the whole child, and having it available alongside the rest of their services means families don’t have to go looking for yet another specialist somewhere else.
Adaptive Riding
Strides Pediatric Therapy has an on-site equestrian facility, which makes them genuinely unusual in the Utah pediatric therapy space. Sometimes referred to as hippotherapy in Utah, Strides’ adaptive riding program is designed for children with disabilities and gives kids a chance to learn horsemanship in an environment built around their individual needs. The potential benefits touch on physical, emotional, cognitive, and social development, and for some kids it ends up being the part of their week they look forward to most. There’s something about working with a horse that reaches certain children in ways a traditional clinic setting simply can’t.
The Kids They See
Strides works with children from birth through age 21 across a wide range of diagnoses and situations, including:
- Autism spectrum disorder
- Cerebral palsy
- Down syndrome
- Sensory processing difficulties
- Developmental delays
- Speech and language disorders
- Feeding and swallowing challenges
- Anxiety and emotional regulation difficulties
- Trauma and attachment challenges
- Traumatic brain injury
- Various genetic syndromes affecting development
The list isn’t exhaustive. Every child who comes through the door has their own story, and the team at Strides approaches each one individually rather than through the lens of a diagnosis alone. If a family is wondering whether their child might be a good fit, reaching out directly is the best way to find out.
Why Eagle Mountain
The clinic is located at 18406 W. White Quest Drive in Eagle Mountain. For families in Utah County, having a full-service pediatric clinic nearby is a bigger deal than it might sound on the surface. Eagle Mountain has grown rapidly over the past decade, and specialized pediatric care hasn’t always kept pace with that growth. Families who need multiple types of therapy for their child have often had to make long drives into the Salt Lake Valley on a regular basis, which adds up quickly in time, fuel, and stress.
Strides Pediatric Therapy fills a real gap for the community. The location also means the equestrian facility is right there on site, not a separate drive to a different location on a different day. Everything is in one place, which is the whole point.
A Team That Treats Families as Partners
One thing that comes up consistently when families talk about their experience at Strides is that they feel like part of the process rather than just observers. Parents aren’t handed a progress report at the end of a session and sent on their way. They’re brought into the conversation about what their child is working on, why the approach looks the way it does, and what they can do at home to support the work happening in the clinic.
That kind of family-centered approach matters because therapy doesn’t just happen during scheduled appointments. The carry-over into daily life is often where the real progress gets made, and families who understand what their child is working toward are much better positioned to support that.
Learn more about Strides Pediatric Therapy by visiting stridespediatrictherapy.com.
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Our Editorial Team are writers and experts in their field. Their views and opinions may not always be the views of Wellbeing Magazine. If you are under the direction of medical supervision please speak to your doctor or therapist before following the advice and recommendations in these articles.
