Feeding Therapy: Cawn/Krantz & Associates: Speech Language Occupational Therapy

Food is essential to a child’s growth: it provides their body with nutrients to facilitate alertness and learning and with energy for play. But eating is also a social activity. From infancy, food is one of the greatest motivators for shared attention, sound play, and reciprocal language development.

The Sensory Oral Sequential Approach (S.O.S.) is an integrative program that addresses the sensory, motor, oral, behavioral, and nutritional components of feeding. For those children whom eating and handling food has become a complex task, the S.O.S Approach empowers them with language, sensory experiences, and strategies for exploring different food. The result is an expanded range of and increased quality in a child's eating experiences.

Individual and group S.O.S therapy sessions are provided at Cawn/Krantz. Both session types follow a structured routine, presenting food in a playful manner that encourages the child to learn that foods can be safe and enjoyable. These presentations increase a child’s ability to smell, touch, taste, eat, and interact with foods. Therapists use language to help predict what food might feel, taste, and smell like, and what the child’s mouth might be required to do with each different food. For example, when introducing carrots, the therapist will comment on carrots and cheese both being orange, but will also note the tactile differences: carrots are harder to break with our fingers than cheese, so we have to bite harder with our teeth when we eat carrots.

An in-depth assessment of a child’s eating patterns can help determine if a child’s feeding difficulties require intervention. This assessment often includes evaluation of the child’s:

• oral-motor structure and oral-motor skills (e.g. swallowing, chewing, jaw/tongue control and mobility)
• respiratory patterns
• sensory processing (e.g., how the child responds visually, behaviorally, and verbally to different food textures, colors, and smells)
• nutrition (child’s current diet)

Parent feedback, obtained through a feeding questionnaire and interview, accompanies the evaluation process.

Because eating is a highly social activity, parents are strongly encouraged to participate in the feeding program with their child. Through S.O.S. therapy, families learn to understand why feeding difficulties are occurring. Parents are also offered opportunities to observe their child during group session. A parent discussion group encourages parents to ask questions and learn how to best support their child outside of the clinic.

For more information on the S.O.S. Approach or other feeding therapies at Cawn/Krantz, please contact clinic co-director Jerri Krantz at (847) 480-8890 x12 or via email.