It’s an age old question. My child needs feeding therapy but do I go to a speech therapist or an occupational therapist? Well the answer may both frustrate and annoy you. The answer is, it depends. Let’s start by discussing what each does with feeding.
Speech Therapy: Becoming a Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) is a long road of schooling that involves a master’s degree and many supervised hours of therapy. A huge part of that education is anatomy of the head and neck, the muscles and structures needed to speak and swallow. Well, here’s the thing, the same muscles you use to talk are the ones you use to eat. So, clearly it makes sense that when we are looking at feeding therapy, it falls under the scope of speech therapy. If your child has difficulties chewing or swallowing, a history of aspiration (food going the wrong way), choking, tongue or lip ties, etc you will likely be referred to an SLP.
Occupational Therapy: Becoming an Occupational Therapist (OT) is also no easy task. This too requires a master’s degree and many supervised hours of therapy. Occupational therapy focuses much of their practice on activities of daily living (ADLs). This includes writing, fine motor skills, dressing, brushing teeth and yep, you guessed it, eating. In addition, occupational therapists are the experts on sensory processing skills. What are sensory processing skills? Goodness that’s a big question that I’ll leave Judi to answer but the basic is sensory processing is how our body takes in and processes information about the world around us. Think of the 5 senses and that barely scratches the surface. Sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. Think about eating and you’ll realize all of those are involved. So, of course, OT’s will work on eating skills.
Here’s the thing though, so very often a kiddo who is a picky eater has issues with all of the above. Well, the good news for you is that many SLPs and OTs are experienced in both and can treat both. (I mean, it’s impossible to work on self feeding and not chewing skills or to work on swallowing skills without working on the sensory aspect of eating.) This is especially true of the crew at Family Chatterbox. Typically what happens is you will be referred to either Tricia or Amber for speech and/or Judi for OT, and depending on your kiddo’s history and one of us will get the evaluation started. Between the 3 of us we have 69 years of experience and have pretty much seen it all. Behind the scenes we collaborate on what your kiddo needs and what we can do to best support you. Sometimes it will be a co-treatment with speech and OT, sometimes it may be working with one discipline and the other comes in occasionally and other times it may be starting with one and switching to the other as your kiddo’s needs change.
So there you have it, the difference between speech and OT is about as clear as mud. Basically, what you need to know is Family Chatterbox is there to meet the needs of your kiddo. No matter the age. No matter the issue we are there to help you navigate it and if we can’t help you we will certainly do everything in our power to find someone who can!
-Tricia-