I have an update for you all. Remember my blog called Food Chaining in Feeding Therapy? In this blog, I talked about a patient of mine who loves frozen bagel bites. As part of his therapy session, we were going to make home-made bagel bites in hopes of chaining his preferred food into new preferred foods. He did great making the mini-pizzas and even took a bite of one when we were done.
Another part of our therapy has been encouraging tolerance of pureed foods (ex. chocolate pudding) on his whole hand. As I have said many times, eating does not start with the first bite. Eating starts with knowing you can tolerate the texture of food on your finger tips, then the palm of your hand, then the back of your hand, and all the way up to your mouth. Many of us take this tolerance for granted. Our children with food aversions have to work hard at tolerating certain textures. During therapy, my patient would only touch his finger tip in pudding as we painted a picture with our fingers and chocolate pudding. He refused and showed signs of fear when I asked him to paint my palm with pudding. He couldn’t even watch me with pudding on my whole hand. But…
A day later, mom emailed me a picture of his hand covered in pizza sauce. How did this happen? Before he left, we talked about what his homework would be. I told him I wanted him to paint with a smooth food and gave him some choices. He picked the pizza sauce. With his family’s support (his sisters joined in the fun) they painted with pizza sauce. The palm of his hand was covered and he even had a smile on his face!
Our next session will be making more home-made bagel bites. Some will have pepperoni like he’s used to…but some will have ham. Over time and multiple exposures, we hope to get him eating ham! 🙂 But until then, we will keep listening to his concerns with food, building trust with meals, and pushing him to expand his diet appropriately!
Speech & Feeding of Frisco 