Occupational Therapy feeding interventions for autism

Paige Flamm

We see many patients in our clinic for occupational therapy feeding interventions for Autism. Feeding therapy is one of the four disciplines we practice in our clinic, and you’d be amazed by all the ways it can benefit children with Autism who need support in this area.

What is Feeding Therapy?:

Feeding therapy is helping an individual overcome struggles that they presently have that stand in the way of them being successful with eating. For some people, they might struggle with the actual mechanics of eating, while others might struggle with the sensory side for example: textures, smells, or the way the food looks; resulting in picky eating. Feeding therapy looks at where a person is currently struggling, and makes a plan of care to help them reach new feeding goals and milestones.

Speech vs Occupational Therapists for Feeding Therapy:

You might be confused to see that feeding therapy is performed by both licensed occupational and speech therapists. These therapists each complete additional training after graduate school to perform these therapies. Both specialties are certainly well trained and equipped to practice feeding therapy, but traditionally they look at separate issues in the feeding process.  Speech therapists typically look at the oral motor functions that go into eating. Can your child put food into their mouth, chew, and swallow in a safe and effective way? These are the things that speech therapists typically work with when doing feeding therapy.

Occupational therapists tend to look at the sensory aspect of eating. Does your child avoid certain foods because of the way they smell, look, and feel? Some children with strong sensory preferences find it difficult to eat because of all the sensory information they’re getting when they sit to eat at the table. Occupational therapists can work with your child to help them manage these sensory experiences to be able to explore a variety of foods and feel more comfortable around them in order to increase their preferred foods to their rotation over time.

At Ability Innovations many of our speech and occupational therapists have received the same feeding trainings and can have cross over in the aspects of feeding that they work with (oral motor vs sensory), so you very well might see a speech therapists working with a child who has sensory feeding needs, but in many cases those are the types of things each specialty is specifically treating.

Feeding Therapy and Autism:

A study published in 2010 found that up to 90% of children with Autism have feeding related struggles. Because many people with Autism have elevated sensory experiences, the smell, textures, and tastes of food can often be very overwhelming for them. Often this can result in a very small list of foods that the individual will eat, which can make it difficult to get all the necessary nutrients that they need in their diet for optimal nutrition. This extreme picky eating can also result in additional health and nutritional issues that make it hard for your child to thrive both physically and emotionally.

A feeding therapist will assess your child to get a baseline of their current eating needs, and then make a plan of care on the types of interventions they will plan for to get your child to a better point with food. The therapist will work slowly overtime by exploring new foods with your child, get them comfortable being around a variety of foods, improve the child’s relationship with food, and eventually add new preferred foods, or maybe old used to eat foods, into their everyday lives.

If you believe your child is having difficulties related to feeding, please contact our office to meet with a speech or occupational therapist who can meet with you for a free consultation!