Learning to Chew

You're probably wondering too...."How in the world do they teach a child to chew when they aren't capable of following commands yet?"

It's interesting to say the least and I've probably been asked that very question over 100 times in recent months.

As you may already know, Little Man's core problem is that he quite simply never learned how to chew. The child can suck just about anything into nothingness and he's learned how to swallow bigger pieces of food in order to compensate, but don't expect to see that jaw moving up and down. In fact, when Little Man first started therapy, he couldn't even move his tongue from side to side.

Now he's got great tongue movement and is even following food with his tongue. We're starting to see some chews with him and once those are more consistent then we'll be able to move onto the next step, releasing food from the bag. (You'll understand what the bag is in a minute).

Most children that have these eating issues also have huge behavioral issues when it comes to eating. Luckily for us, Little Man started therapy just as those behaviors were starting to emerge.

So step one is behavioral. He had to be trained to a way of eating using 'preferred' foods. That way you can increase textures, volume, etc without the behavioral issues. Luckily for us/Little Man that part of the therapy was quick since behaviors weren't too big of an issue to begin with.

Alongside of training him to eat, we start using exercises to loosen up his cheek muscles and attempting to get him to follow our finger with his tongue.

Then we move on to the tools, lol.

So here are some pictures of the exercises we've been using. (oh yeah, and the 'tools'.)

The orange and yellow ones are called "Chewy Tubes"

After doing the exercises and stretches with his mouth, we move on to the mesh bag with a food in it. (just a note: we do go back and forth between the bag and the chewy tubes during each session)

That's a red gummy bear and the mesh in my hand.

The food (gummy bear, nutrigrain bar w/yogurt, licorice, crackers, etc) is rolled and twisted up into the mesh like this so that it can be placed on his molars to encourage chewing.

Where do we go from here? Well I don't have all of those answers yet since we aren't there but I do know that one of the next steps is to release food from the bag once he's chewing more consistently for us.

So in a nutshell, this is what we've done with Little Man so far. Any questions?