Food Texture Transition

Common concerns:

• Coughing, choking, gagging or vomiting on certain textures
• Delayed transition to purees by 7 months
• By 9 months, does not eat dissolvable and soft solids (e.g., puffs, dissolvable yoghurt buttons, soft cooked vegetables, soft fruit)
• By 12 months, does not eat finger foods (e.g., pieces of bread, biscuits, diced fruit, small bits of meat)
• Avoids an entire food texture group (e.g., lumpy, crunchy, meats)

This program is focused on your child’s oral-motor skills and normalising sensory responses to food.

What’s involved:

Before your initial feeding assessment we will send you an in depth case history form to complete, describing your child’s feeding challenges. Please take your time completing this, as it will provide us with a comprehensive understanding of your child’s feeding history, and save time during your initial consultation. We will then ask you to please bring a mix of 3-4 different textured foods from home. We will observe your child eating to assess their feeding skills with different textures and determine challenges resulting from specific feeding skill difficulties (oral-motor, fine motor, sensory responses). Based on the assessment findings, we will then create a plan of care to help your child learn to eat a variety of food textures.

Feeding therapy approaches:

• Teach oral motor skills
• Normalising sensory response to different foods (e.g. using ARK’s Z-vibe handle)
• Neuromuscular electrical stimulation (VitalStim Plus) – if eligible. See State of the Art Technology for more info