Is your child having significant feeding difficulties?
Was a tube placement recommended for your child to support nutritional intake?
Are some foods harder to eat for your child, possibly due to sensory difficulties?
Whatever the case, we know it can be devastating when your child is not eating.
We want to help!
Feeding & Swallowing Evaluations
We believe in looking at the whole child rather than focusing on one part of the child. This helps us better provide better individualized treatment. During the evaluation, we will begin with a case history and explore your child's feeding development with you. TicTalkToes Therapy believes in a multidisciplinary approach, so we may ask to contact your child's pediatrician, nutritionist, gastroenterologist, and/or occupational therapist. A food log, a video, and other information to better understand your child's food inventory and meals may be requested. If your child is under 12 months, we will integrate the NCAST FEEDING SCALE into the evaluation to help us describe the caregiver-child communication and interaction during a feeding situation. We explore behaviors, eating skills, sensory skills, and development to figure out why these challenges are happening. The length of an assessment can range from an hour to two hours (not including writing time) depending on the needs of your child.
Following the written report, a phone call will be scheduled to discuss the findings with the parent/caregiver of the child. We will go
over goals, recommendations, and finalize the treatment plan with you that will eventually be the focus of your child's therapy sessions.
If your child has been evaluated by another therapist, please provide us a copy of the report to begin services.
Feeding
Therapy
We offer individual and group feeding treatment sessions for infants, toddlers, and adolescents. Frequency and duration for your child's therapy is based on his or her needs and may change as your child progresses.
During feeding therapy, we will develop fun and motivating ways to work on oral motor skills to help make the muscles of the mouth stronger, getting the child to try new foods and liquids, experiment with different food textures, help with behaviors during meal times, and ultimately, increasing his or her food intake and food variety.
Feeding therapy and it's success is not just reliant on the child, but is integrated into the parent-child relationship. We integrate dyadic work with feeding therapy, to ensure the child is making progress when we are not there. We believe caregivers and other important people in your child's life are also part of the team! Therefore, we provide education, home plans, and ideas for you to help support your child's skills in their every day environment!
We assess and provide treatment services to address:
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Food refusal/selectivity
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Failure to Thrive
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Increasing nutritional intake
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Preemies & Newborns
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Non-Oral Eaters/Tube Fed Children
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Anxiety around food
If you have concerns about your child's feeding or would like to better understand your child's feeding habits, consider completing the Feeding Matters Infant and Child Feeding Questionnaire, developed by internationally-recognized feeding experts.