Feeding Your Child

For any child who has problems with digestion or food allergies, special diets can cost huge amounts of time and cause stress and frustration for parents. 

 

Special formulas are expensive, and difficult to buy and store.  If your child cannot tolerate a food, like wheat or milk, you have to become a wiz at buying and cooking two kinds of food for your family.

 

You might also avoid restaurants or gatherings at homes of others due the attention paid to your child’s special diet.  Having special diet needs can make you and your family feel less like everyone else and can cause you to separate yourself from others. 

 

No matter what, your child has to eat.  If your child starts life not being able to suck and swallow food, everything medically necessary will be done to save his life.  For a child like this, the road toward eating food orally is a long one with many small steps on the way. 

 

If your child does not progress along a typical trajectory for eating in the first year or two, it’s common to get stuck on this road before your child learns to eat orally.  Sometimes parents stay at the ‘saving his life’ stage – continuing to give their child sustenance by means that become habit, but do not lead to eating orally. 

 

To get off this stage, ask your child’s therapist to guide you through small changes in how you feed your child (see What is effective therapy?).  Therapy techniques applied by a therapist two times a week are insufficient to change your child’s ability to eat (see The dosage is wrong.) 

 

If you let the therapist dictate what is worked-on (not eating) or don’t participate in deciding on the goals for therapy, you give up some of the small amount of control you have in your child’s therapy (see Control you have and control you have not).  Pay attention to whether you hope to make changes within your child, or learn new ways to include your child in the life(style) of your family. 

 

I’ve met many children whose parents, under the duress of everything associated with having a child with a disability, quit moving down the road toward oral eating. 

 

The habits you form during feeding will have long term implications for your child’s growth and development.  Learning to eat orally after the age of 5 years is not impossible, but it is extremely difficult. 

 

If you want your child to eat orally expect to change how you feed your child. Ask your therapist to teach you how to feed your child in a way that will provide nutrition and promote oral control.  (There are techniques – I’ve used them and they work.) 

 

The first thing to consider is what position your child is in while eating.  His position – sitting, reclined, being held, even standing – all make a difference in how you feed him and how he eats and whether he learns to eat in a more mature manner. 

 

Eating in a restaurant or buying pre-prepared take-out food daily for dinner is common for American families.  Regardless of the where the food comes from, or where it is eaten, a lot of social and relationship behavior occurs and is learned at family meals. 

 

As much as is possible and reasonable, include your special child at the dinner table on a regular basis.  Food is basic to our lives, and has a huge impact on the emotional and social development of children. 

 

How you feed your special child has huge implications for the rest of his life, and for yours.  If you have a feeding success story, please share it here or on your own blog for other parents to read.   

Comments

[Heather]

Hi Barbara,

Thank you for visiting Our Kids Are Special. I would certainly be interested in exchanging links with you. Your blog offers some very valuable information.

Best,
Heather