Playing With Our Food: An OT’s Guide to Making Food Fun
Feeding can be a very scary and high anxiety activity. When we do Feeding Therapy here at Reach for Speech, the goal is to make feeding fun. We want our patients to make progress towards their goals and the best way to do that is by bringing the joy back into the task!
This helps make food less scary, promotes engagement through touching, which in turn allows us to progress through more desensitization steps such as bringing it to our face, nose, and lips. From there we can progress to touching to teeth or licking, and so forth until we finally reach biting, chewing, and swallowing all kinds of new foods!
One great way to get a child engaged with touching a food that might make them feel scared or anxious is by incorporating familiar foods in with the new food and turning them into something they are not through pretend play. You can see in the image below how our OT Miss Natalie put this into practice in one of her recent feeding sessions.
In this example, we already knew that our friend liked bananas. He was happy to smell the other foods but struggled to progress further.
By turning the less preferred foods like salami, celery, and crackers into a car, he felt comfortable enough to touch the food to engage in pretend play with the cars.
Near the end of his session, he began to feel more comfortable and was less scared when we brought the items to our lips and tongue.
This activity successfully increased his engagement with the food without making him feel pressured to eat it right away, he was able to get comfortable being around the food before taking the next big step towards eating something new!
Some great ways Miss Natalie reccomends to tailor this concept to fit your child’s ability and interests include:
Incorporating their interests to inspire play.
Try roleplaying, for example that you are a customer who needs food prepared.
Printing out coloring sheets and using different foods to fill in the spaces i.e. blueberries for buttons, crackers for eyes, carrots for the nose, etc.
Using a cookie cutter to cut the food into a shape that will get them excited.
Incorporating fun plates or utensils that might get them interested in what you are offering.
Using clean up as a way to encourage them to take the next step towards eating a food.
We hope that these ideas have given you some inspiration for your kiddo’s next snack session. If introducing new foods is something that your child struggles with, reach out to us here at Reach for Speech to find out more about our feeding clinic and how we can help your child progress and overcome the anxiety they may face surrounding trying unfamiliar flavors!