Helping Your Child After Witnessing a Choking Incident
As parents, you want to provide both emotional support and practical guidance to help your child regain a sense of safety. Inside, you’ll find some compassionate ways to talk to your child about choking, ease their anxiety, and help them re-engage with eating and school environments confidently.
Surviving More Than One Kind of Storm
Just like with the storm, there’s an enormous amount of emotional energy wrapped up in feeding challenges—prepping meals, managing meltdowns, staying up late wondering if things will ever get easier.
Is Your Child Really Hungry?
As parents you may often wonder, “Is my child truly hungry, or are they just eating to please me?” This question can be especially challenging for parents of picky eaters. The difference between eating out of compliance and eating out of genuine interest can be subtle, but recognizing this distinction can significantly affect how your child engages with food and develops healthy eating habits.
Unlocking Your Child’s Superpower
Have you ever asked your child if they’re hungry, and their answer is… confusing, at best? Maybe they say they’re full but still ask for a snack 10 minutes later. Or they refuse to eat, yet you know it’s been hours since their last meal. What gives?
Here’s where interoception comes into play. It’s a fancy word for a concept that is both simple and very complex at the same time.
The Worry Cycle of Feeding Challenges
With every failed mealtime, you feel the weight of worry and frustration about your child's eating habits. Whether you've faced feeding challenges from day one, dealt with health issues like reflux, or had a great eater who turned picky as a toddler, the stress and anxiety these challenges bring to the whole family are immense.
You’re in the right place if you’ve tried every trick in the book to get your child to eat.
Help and Hope for Food Allergies
If you’ve ever experienced the realm of food allergies, you know that allergies are tricky little buggers. What might be a small rash during the first exposure could turn into a full-blown medical emergency on the next one.
The more we know about allergy symptoms and treatments, the more we can rest in our knowledge and feel confident that we will know how to handle an emergency if it ever happens.
Let’s learn what to look for with the most common food allergy symptoms.
Nurturing emotional resilience: supporting children through sensory meltdowns
How you respond to your child will largely depend on their age, their cognitive and language abilities (keeping in mind that during a meltdown we lose the ability to communicate effectively), their sensory preferences and even their diagnosis, if they have one. With that in mind, here are some general tips to help lessen a meltdown.
Act Now: Seek Help Early for Feeding Challenges
Seeking help from a feeding specialist is not just about finding solutions — it's about reclaiming your power as a parent. It's about saying, "I refuse to let feeding challenges define my child's future." It's about standing up and fighting for your child's right to flourish.
SENSORY-FRIENDLY TRAVEL TIPS
Whether or not you have family members with sensory sensitivities, we all have unique sensory preferences. By acknowledging and honoring these preferences, we can turn what might have been a struggle-filled vacation into a luxurious, harmonious experience. By considering sensory needs before, during, and after your getaway, we can navigate any challenges with grace, ensuring that the memories we create are nothing short of extraordinary.
A lion’s pride: Embracing neurodiversity through a strengths-based play approach
Neurodiversity is a concept that acknowledges and celebrates the natural variation in the human brain. It emphasizes and celebrates the concept that neurological differences, such as autism and ADHD, are natural variations of the human experience. Embracing a neurodiverse perspective involves recognizing and valuing the unique strengths, abilities, and perspectives that each individual brings to life.
The world of neurodiversity has had radical advances within the last few years, and we embrace what autistic individuals have been telling us and showing us all along.
Sensory Accommodations:
When I’m problem-solving to find sensory regulation activities for a child within an educational environment, I like to start with the end goal in mind. As a pediatric occupational therapist, I always start with a simple goal: to help each child be as independent and functional as possible. How we get to that goal can look very different, depending on the unique sensory system each child brings to the table.
The overarching truth surrounding sensory regulation is: Sensory regulation needs to match the situation and the environment.
From Play to Plate
From play to plate:
How motor planning play is crucial to fostering better eating habits in kids
With bonus motor planning play activity suggestions
Why won’t my kid eat?
Why won’t my kid eat?
Making sense of picky eating and finding solutions
More than 50% of parents of young children report that they are concerned about their child’s eating habits. While some picky eating habits are a normal developmental stage, others have deep roots. When we invest time in figuring out root causes, it’s easier to find strategies that will work best for your child.
Cultivating Resilience in Your Children
We like to think about cultivating the environment to be supportive and sprinkling the seeds for curiosity. Kids are naturally curious when they feel safe and supported.
Why the “wait and see” approach is a bad idea for picky eaters
It’s not uncommon for you as parents to hear advice from others to “wait and see” when you’re wondering what to do about your child’s eating difficulties. While on the surface, the wait and see approach may give a glimmer of hope that your child will eventually grow out of it, it does nothing to quell your well-justified concerns in the moment. Here we’ll discuss reasons why “wait and see” isn’t the best course of action when your child faces feeding difficulties.
What’s the ONE THING picky eaters typically can’t resist?? FOOD PLAY!
The adventure of food play goes beyond expanding palates and developing essential skills in picky eaters. It's about building connections, trust, and a sense of safety within the feeding relationship.
Prepare for Lunchtime Success
At That Makes Sense OT, we know you strive to provide your children with a healthy and balanced diet, ensuring they receive the nutrients they need to grow and flourish. When faced with pediatric feeding disorders and picky eating tendencies, mealtimes can be challenging... and those lunchbox meals? Yikes! We’ve compiled a list of comprehensive and research-based strategies to avoid food jags.
Preventing restraint collapse (meltdowns)with after-school sensory-friendly routines
Restraint collapse is when a child has held themselves in check throughout their whole school day, navigating their sensory challenges, and then as soon as they are home in their safe space, they allow their dysregulation to show. Helping a child cope with this sensory overload after school is important to help them regroup and to give them strategies they can start to use during the school day, as well.
The Magic Ingredient for Peaceful Mealtimes with Picky Eaters, Revealed
Have you ever found yourself teetering on the brink of exhaustion, feeling as drained as a squeezed-out juice box, after yet another epic battle at the dinner table with your picky eater? Oh, the eye rolls, the sighs, the refusal to eat anything remotely green—it's enough to make any supermom question her culinary skills and sanity.
Sensory Overwhelm: How to Spot it and What to Do About It
Sensory overwhelm refers to a condition where a child's sensory system becomes overloaded by environmental stimuli, such as sounds, lights, textures, smells, or even social interactions. This overload can cause distress, anxiety, and even meltdowns in children, making it essential for parents to be aware of the signs and respond with sensitivity and support.