Supporting Children with Diverse Abilities Through Therapy: Enabling Wellbeing, Function and Participation

Dear Colleagues,

Historically, clinical research and practice for children with developmental differences centred on isolated skills, impairments, and body functions, with intervention success measured primarily by standardised test performance or impairment-level outcomes.

Informed by the World Health Organization’s ICF-CY framework, a paradigm shift has redefined children’s functioning within the context of daily life. Children’s health and wellbeing are now understood as dynamic interactions between body functions/structures, personal and environmental factors, and life participation. Meaningful improvement requires supporting children’s and families’ valued participation in daily activities, relationships, and roles, rather than skill acquisition alone.

In paediatric rehabilitation, education, and social services, clinical focus has shifted from test-based skill performance to core priorities including occupational engagement, functional participation, quality of life, wellbeing, and family-centred, strengths-based practice. This Special Issue responds to the demand for high-quality clinical research advancing the conceptualisation, measurement, and support of function, participation, and wellbeing in children with diverse abilities.

The aim of this Special Issue is to advance evidence-based understanding of how clinical assessment, therapeutic intervention, education, and translational research can meaningfully support function, wellbeing, and participation for children with diverse abilities.

The scope of this Special Issue focuses on clinical paediatric rehabilitation research, welcoming contributions from a variety of disciplines, including occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech‑language pathology, education, social work, psychology, nutrition and developmental medicine. This Special Issue centres on evaluation and intervention approaches that move beyond performance factors and isolated skills, emphasising instead how therapeutic interventions support participation, engagement, and quality of life across home, school, and community clinical and real-world contexts.

This Special Issue seeks to highlight cutting-edge clinical research that reflects current and emerging directions in paediatric rehabilitation practice and scholarship, including:

• Innovative clinical measures of function, participation, engagement, and wellbeing;
• Intervention approaches that explicitly target meaningful participation in life activities rather than discrete skill acquisition alone;
• Research examining contextual, environmental, and social determinants of participation relevant to paediatric clinical care;
• Family-centred, child-centred, and strengths-based therapeutic intervention approaches;
• Knowledge translation and translational science efforts that bridge the gap between clinical research findings and real-world functional engagement;
• Methodological advances in capturing children’s lived experiences in clinical research, including participatory and mixed-methods designs.

We welcome a range of manuscript types focused on paediatric clinical research, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Empirical studies (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods) related to paediatric therapeutic assessment, measurement, and intervention;
• Systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and narrative reviews addressing function, participation, engagement, and wellbeing in children with diverse abilities;
• Translational and implementation research focused on moving clinical evidence into everyday therapeutic practice;
• Conceptual and theoretical papers that advance clinical models of participation, engagement, and occupational performance for children with diverse abilities.

All submissions must clearly address how their work contributes to the understanding or clinical enablement of meaningful engagement, function, participation, and wellbeing in children with diverse abilities.

Dr. Janice Tona
Dr. Shelly J. Lane
Guest Editors

Dr. Michelle J. Newby
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Children is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• paediatric
• neurodevelopmental
• occupational engagement
• function
• participation
• quality of life
• wellbeing
• disability
• diverse ability
• international classification of functioning (ICF)
• assessment
• intervention
• knowledge translation