KLUGE CHILDREN’S REHABILITATION CENTER
ENCOURAGEMENT FEEDING PROGRAM BARRIERS TO ORAL EATING
The following are 5 barriers that we have identified as hindering a child’s transition to oral feeding after the medical complications have been resolved. Your child most likely will have a combination of a few of these barriers. Our goal is to peel away the layers and to promote age appropriate oral eating.
- Disrupted hunger/satiety regulation: Those children who know how to bite and chew but have never regulated their own hunger/satiety, and therefore do not eat enough to have their tube feeding reduced.
- Inexperience: Those children who have no experience with eating and need to be taught how to tolerate, manipulate and chew foods.
- Disordered contingency learning style: Those children whose development is disordered which results in difficulty understanding behavioral shaping principals commonly used in therapy to increase oral exploration. Usually these children do not understand contingencies consistently.
- Disordered sensory/anxiety issues: Those children whose sensory systems are severely impaired and are unable to even approach eating.
- Psychosocial issues: Those children who have normal oral motor and sensory skills but who appear to have ongoing parent-child interaction issues.