Feeding tips for kids with special needs

Max has been eating a lot lately. For breakfast alone, the kid can down three oatmeals, an egg burrito and chocolate milk. Hello, growth spurt! Happily, Max's ability to eat and drink have improved over the years (the cerebral palsy messes with tongue control and swallowing), but he still has issues with retention and he isn't yet up to chewing on crunchy or hard foods.

I recently went to a therapy session at his school with a well-respected, experienced feeding therapist, and wanted to share some of her tips.

Practice with crunchy foods

Place a crunchy item that easily dissolves, like a Cheez Doodles or onion ring, on your child's molar to practice biting and crunching. We also practice this with French toast sticks, strips of grilled cheese and pieces of potato. 

Thicken thin liquids

The idea is to make liquids more of a nectar consistency, so more is retained. We add Hormel Thick & Easy to chocolate milk and other beverages. The stuff used to only come in canisters, but is now available in packets. CVS now makes its own Instant Food Thickener and it's a good deal. Hormel also has pre-thickened juices, along with already-thickened water (but, really, it's a no-brainer to dump the stuff in yourself). You can also mix applesauce and water for a thickened juice, or yogurt and milk, or just buy some juice purees like the ones Gerber Graduates and Peter Rabbit Organics make.

Strengthen jaws with Chewy Tubes

We'd been using these right before meals, to loosen up Max's jaw, but this therapist felt pretty strongly that meals should be focused on eating, not therapy. So now we use these before snacks and during the actual therapy. We place the stick on Max's back right molar, have him bite down and count to ten, repeat three more times, then switch to his other molar.

Practice sipping with fat straws

Dip a fat straw into chocolate pudding so Max learns to close his lips around the straw, the therapist suggested. Eventually, she promised, he will suck the pudding out from inside the straw. It hasn't happened yet, but Max sure has been enjoying practicing. Hot tip: Burger King has fat straws. (Combine that with my penchant for swiping those stubby IKEA pencils and I'm turning into a virtual kleptomaniac.)  

Make kids who drool more aware of swallowing

Kids with cerebral palsy and other oral motor issues often can't manage their front salivary glands and tongue, so saliva pools and doesn't get thrust back, toward the throat. Hence, the drool. There's a patch that can help dry up saliva, the Transderm Scop (it's usually used for sea sickness) and even surgery to reverse salivary glands, but I haven't wanted to go those routes. The therapist recommended that, using a straw as a pipette, we drip ice water into Max's mouth under his tongue to make him more aware of swallowing a pool of water. He has to learn to gather it together and move it back, a movement that does not come naturally to him. "Cue him if you see him pooling by tapping on his tongue," she said. She also suggested Max wear wristbands, and we could remind him to wipe the drool; it's a great tip, but Max hasn't been into the wristbands. Even purple ones. 

Lean forward during tooth-brushing

Tooth-brushing is a challenge because Max doesn't spit. So she recommended we bend him slightly forward, so liquid will run out. Such a simple thing, but a big help.