Feeding Therapy
Our feeding therapy is designed for food exploration, highlighting family time, improving oral motor strength and coordination, expanding food variety, and increasing positive experiences with food and at mealtime.
Our feeding therapists can help children from birth to teens who are having difficulty chewing or drinking, and can help picky eaters improve their relationship with food.
Who
Feeding therapy can help children who experience:
- Discomfort trying new foods
- Avoidance of mealtimes
- Fear touching new foods
- Inability to engage during mealtimes
- Difficulty managing food in their mouth
- Poor management of utensils or self-feeding skills
What
Feeding therapy is more than just “teaching a child to eat.” Therapists work closely with patients and their families to determine the source of the child’s difficulties and develop targeted strategies to make the entire process of eating easier and more enjoyable.
Activities may include but are not limited to:
- Oral motor strengthening
- Food play
- Simple food prep (preparation)
- Using adaptive equipment
- Parent engagement/coaching
When
A child might benefit from feeding therapy if any of the behaviors below are affecting a child’s ability to safely eat, meet nutritional needs or enjoy the mealtime experience.
- Typically swallowing food in one piece.
- Refusing to eat or swallow certain textures or consistencies
- Gags on, avoids or is very sensitive to certain food textures, temperatures and/or flavors
- Struggles to control and coordinate moving food around in mouth
- Pushes food away
- Negative mealtime behaviors
- Infant demonstrating signs of difficulty with coordinating the suck/swallow/breath pattern during bottle or breastfeeding
- Feeding time taking longer than 30 minutes for infants, and 30 to 40 minutes for toddlers or young children
- Known to be a “picky eater” who eats a limited variety of foods or consistencie
