If your child struggles with picky eating, feeding therapy may be the answer. It helps children expand their food choices and improve their nutritional habits.
Let’s dig into why your child may exhibit picky eating behaviors and how food therapy can help them with their struggles.
To start, children may demonstrate food selectivity for a number of reasons. Oftentimes, those reasons are not because they are stubborn or “just being difficult.” Picky eating may be a result of a negative oral experience, oral-motor issues, or sensory-processing struggles. Here are three common signs that your child might benefit from feeding therapy:
- Strong food aversions
- Struggles with textures or tastes
- Struggles with chewing or swallowing
To address your child’s picky eating, it’s important to work with a feeding therapist to first identify the cause of their aversions and then develop a plan customized to your child’s food refusal.
Although there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to feeding therapy, here are four basic session ideas that address picky eating.
Food play
It’s helpful for a child to experience new foods through play before they begin to incorporate them into their diets. Let them create artwork with different colored and shaped pasta noodles. Make a face on their pancakes with berries, chocolate chips, and whipped cream—with no pressure to eat it. Encourage them to squish a cut-up avocado between their fingers!
Sensory steps
If food play feels too challenging as a starting point, you can back up to the following sensory steps:
- Looking
- Touching
- Smelling
- Kissing
- Licking
- Biting
- Spitting out
Once a child is comfortable with these interactions, you can encourage chewing and slowly work towards swallowing.
Cooking together
For many children, it’s helpful for them to be involved with food preparation. Not only does this allow them to interact with the ingredients before eating them, but it also gives them a greater sense of control and understanding.
Parent involvement during feeding therapy sessions
Don’t be discouraged if your child is willing to explore new foods in therapy but unwilling to repeat the same behaviors at home. To help your child feel more comfortable practicing their feeding therapy skills at home, consider the following steps:
- Your child tastes and engages with new foods during a session with their food therapist.
- Your child tastes and engages with new foods with a parent sitting in on a session.
- Your child tastes and engages with new foods with a parent actively participating in a session.
- Your child tastes and engages with new foods with a parent during structured practice time. Start small, with just 10 minutes per day outside of therapy. Ask your child to share their progress and setbacks with their therapist during their next session.
- Your child tastes and engages with new foods during mealtimes at home.
Remember: Even if your child is resistant to your home-based strategies, it’s always helpful to keep their new skills top-of-mind during meal and snack time. You can even create a tracking chart to help them monitor—and be proud of!—their progress.
Ultimately, feeding therapy focuses on sensory integration (i.e. learning to be comfortable with tastes and textures), oral motor skills, and positive mealtime routines.
It can help your child learn to try new foods with confidence and develop healthy eating habits that will last a lifetime. Better yet, it’ll reduce mealtime stress and lead to more peaceful time around the dinner table.
At the Center for Rising Minds, we’d love to help you and your family with your mental health care needs! Please reach out to us today to inquire about our services or join our waitlist.
