Abstract
Models of practice serve to organize a discipline's knowledge and conceptual explanations for how changes occur. This article presents a model of practice in occupational therapy for children and identifies the profession's area of interest as the development of everyday activities rather than child development. Changes in children's engagement in activities are the product of the interdependent influences of a community's investment in childhood activities and cultural practices of adults, interpersonal interactions with other people during activities, and young children's effort to do the things that they find interesting or activities expected of them. Clinical reasoning and activity analysis focus on the children's activities in their natural environments and the quality of their engagement. A case example illustrates how the model generates occupational therapy services centered on an everyday activity and enables a young child's satisfactory engagement in drawing as part of his inclusive child care program.