Oral Motor Therapy

Image of therapist assisting infant with feeding therapy

Oral Motor Therapy helps:

  • Identify and improve movement patterns of the jaw, tongue, lips, and cheeks through the use of repetitive muscle-based exercises.

  • Oral Motor exercises improve mobility, awareness of placement, coordination, and strength of the oral-facial muscles.

  • Aid in developing appropriate movement patterns for children with structural issues such as tongue-ties, lip-ties, cleft palate, and high arched palates.

  • Help alter physiological issues such as high or low tone, respiratory capacity, and suck-swallow-breathe synchrony.

Image of Dr. Jenn Moore working with young girl on feeding therapy

We provide Feeding Therapy to:

  • Address compensations developed due to behavior, sensory, and physiological factors.

  • Increase the child's food repertoire in order to increase their caloric intake.

  • Improve acceptance of a variety of foods while decreasing refusal behaviors.

 Our Certified SOS Approach Feeding Specialist, Naomi Sutton, has studied directly under Dr. Kay Toomey, the program's founder. SOS teaches children struggling with transitioning from different food textures to work on desensitizing to food textures, flavors, and temperatures, and teach sensory-based problem solving skills for children who struggle transitioning from various food textures.

So what are the signs of a pediatric feeding disorder?

  • Refusing breast and/or bottle

  • Poor weight gain

  • Coughing or choking while eating

  • Difficulty accepting solid foods at 6 to 7 months

  • Difficulty progressing from purees to soft solids by 8 months

  • Unable to drink from an open cup or straw by 12 to 18 months

  • Limited food repertoire

  • Anxiety with new foods

  • Negative mealtime behaviors

  • Difficulty moving or chewing foods in their mouth

  • Frequently overstuffing their mouth

  • Gagging or vomiting

  • Extended mealtimes (anything past 20 minutes)

Our services

  • We live to eat! The goal of a therapeutic feeding program is to develop a set of techniques that support the safe intake of food and maximize the client's ability to tolerate and interact with a variety of food textures, flavors, and temperatures.

    Our daily meals provide us with a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment but also afford us the opportunity to engage with our family and friends for holidays and social gatherings. Many children do not have the underlying sensory motor skills to handle food and therefore present with limited diets based upon their sensory and motor systems. Food is not innately reinforcing and mealtimes are often stressful.

  • Eating is a learned behavior. Research shows that learning about food happens in two main ways. The first is when a connection is made in time between one natural event, behavior, or object and another neutral stimulus. For example, we know that feeling sick to your stomach causes a physical reaction of appetite suppression. This is a natural event. If we consistently feel nauseous after eating a certain food, pretty soon that food itself will make us sick.

    The second way we learn is through reinforcement and punishment. For example, eating followed by praise (positive reinforcement) leads to more eating. However, refusing to eat followed by lots of attention (positive reinforcement) will encourage more refusal.

    Eating followed by choking or gagging or vomiting creates fear and results in less eating. If learning about food is unpleasant, then our bodies will turn off our appetites. The overall goal of all treatment with children who won't eat is to create a situation which positively reinforces normal, healthy eating patterns.

  • Prior to undergoing a frenectomy, our speech language pathologists' will begin to stimulate the child's lips, cheeks, and tongue while using a variety of oral motor tools. The goal is to desensitize the child to the oral motor exercises and sensations prior to the surgical intervention. Specifically, the therapist will work on developing the muscle tone, graded strength and dissociation of movements in muscle groups. The therapist will work on both passive and active movement exercises.

    Post-operatively, therapy is focused on neuromuscular re-education (teaching normalized muscle movements), tissue stimulation, and prevention of abnormal regrowth. We provide stimulation using various oral motor exercises, oral facial massage, and work on the oral placement of edibles for feeding.

  • Oral Placement Therapy (OPT) is a form of therapy that utilizes a combination of auditory stimulation, visual stimulation, and tactile stimulation to the mouth to improve speech clarity.

    Clients with motor and/or speech impairments benefit from tactile and proprioceptive components because OPT improves articulator awareness, placement, stability, and muscle memory which are all necessary for speech intelligibility.

 What are the goals of Feeding Therapy?

  • Understanding that eating is a learned skill which all children can acquire

  • Considering the physical, medical, nutritional, developmental, learning, environmental, oral motor, postural and sensory factors involved in a child's current eating abilities

  • Focusing on child-directed, family-centered feeding

  • Ensuring our program is individualized for each child's specific needs

  • Educating caregivers on how to help children eat well

  • Collaborating and learning on a daily basis to help our program and our families improve

 We specialize in the evaluation and treatment of oral function for speech and feeding, OMDs, and the presence of tethered oral tissues (tongue, buccal, and lip ties) including pre- and post-operative treatment. We work directly with a team of physicians who specialize in the treatment and management of tethered oral tissue.

Our Kitchen

We have a full sized kitchen which includes various equipment to aid learners in becoming independent by working on areas such as activities of daily living (cooking, cleaning, washing dishes, washing hands, brushing teeth), as well as feeding therapy.

Our kitchen allows for children to make their own food, cook it, and then set up our full sized table for their meal. This helps facilitate carry over to the home environment as well as providing a positive experience with food exploration.

If your child is exhibiting any of these signs, contact us .

  • Thumb and finger sucking habits

  • A routine habit of resting with the lips apart

  • A forward resting posture of the tongue between or against the teeth

  • Tongue Thrust

  • Other harmful oral habits

  • Long term mouth-breathing patterns that compromise overall healthy breathing

  • Establishment of detrimental oral habits that impede further growth and development

  • Establishment of atypical patterns that impact chewing and swallowing

  • The improper development/alignment of the teeth

  • The improper development of jaw growth and facial structure

  • Slowing the process of orthodontic treatment

  • Undermining the long-term stability of orthodontic treatment, resulting in malocclusion relapse

  • Negatively impacting the stability and function of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ)

  • Speech distortions

  • Negatively affecting social relationships due to open mouth postures or noisy chewing and swallowing patterns

Oral Motor & Feeding Resources

Orofacial Myofunctional Disorder

(OMD; https://www.iaom.com/faq/)

Orofacial Myofunctional Disorders are atypical, adaptive patterns that emerge in the absence of normalized patterns within the orofacial complex. The regular presence of these adaptive movements can often result in a variety of disturbances.