Last week we looked at how sensory properties of foods can impact the number and kinds of foods a child eats. This week, we will look at another big factor that may be contributing to a limited diet – oral motor skills. When your speech therapist talks about oral motor skills, they are referring to the child’s ability to move different muscles in their mouth and coordinate movements to complete an action. In this case, that action would be chewing and swallowing the food.
For most of us, it seems like a simple task to chew and swallow foods, but there are many intricate movements that we make without thinking about them to achieve this. Let’s break it down. First, we place the food in the front of our mouths on our tongue (or bite at the front). Then, we have to move the food to our molars using our tongue tip. Once the food is there, we have to hold the food on our teeth while we chew it. We use the sides of our tongue and our cheeks to do this. We then use a circular motion of our jaws to mash and grind up the food. Once the food is chewed up enough, we move the food back to the center of our tongue in the back of our mouth, and then we swallow. This is just 1 bite of food. The skills are different for cup and straw drinking as well. (That will be another blog for another day!) That is a lot of coordination that we do just naturally!
Let’s think for a minute about how it may feel if one of these aspects was difficult to complete. Think about when you place a food on the front of your tongue. Now, imagine that you can’t move it to the side of your mouth onto your teeth to chew it. What do you do? How do you feel? How do you get it to the back of your mouth? What if it’s too big of a piece and it gets too far back? These are just a few questions that may come up if you have difficulty with one of the first steps we do when we eat.
A child can have difficulty with any of these steps above. They may have difficulty with moving their tongue separately from their jaw, which makes it hard to move the food at all in the mouth. They can have difficulty with jaw strength, which impacts their ability to bite foods into pieces or how effectively they chew foods. The skills that are listed above are skills that an SLP (Speech-Language Pathologist) would look at to determine if the skills are where they need to be for a variety of foods.
Check back to see some red flags or behaviors to watch for that may help determine if feeding therapy would be a good fit for your child!
-Amber