Feeding skills are vital for your child’s healthy growth and development, but sometimes children can struggle to get the nutrients they need. My name is Brittany Keene. I’m an occupational therapist here at Building Futures Pediatric Therapy. Today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about feeding therapy and some different ways that therapy can help your child.
Common Causes of Feeding Difficulties in Children
Some of the various things that we’re looking for with feeding therapy are problems that your child might have, including:
- tongue or lip tie
- still using a bottle
- developmental delays
How Pediatric Therapy Helps with Feeding Struggles
Occupational therapy works a lot on both the sensory and the motor component of feeding. We’re working on not only helping the child feed themselves independently and get their independence needed for school, but we’re also working on the sensory components, such as:
- Are they averse to different types of food?
- Do we only like crunchy food versus soft food?
- Are we eating mostly things through a straw and like a smoothie versus eating real food?
Some other difficulties you might see with feeding are things like choking or coughing and gagging whenever they eat. These can be a sign of a sensory aversion to the food as well as a swallowing concern.
Building Futures Can Help with Feeding Struggles
Our therapists can look a little bit more in depth at your child and see if there’s anything that we can help with to make their feeding more successful for not only you, but the child as well. If you have any concerns, we’d love to hear from you at Building Futures.
