Here are some fun ways to target
oral motor skills during play and daily routines with your child that provide multiple opportunities to practice each skill and are fun for everyone!
Through opportunities to practice
new oral motor skills and through gradual challenges that build on existing skills, babies learn to eat.
Parents and their children are actually participating in oral motor activities and
modeling oral motor skills during their daily routines without even being aware of it.
They may also be children who have
poor oral motor skills, may drool excessively, may have poor eating skills (under weight or over weight) and poor oral hygiene habits.
If a child uses a sippy cup excessively and doesn't develop a mature swallowing pattern,
then oral motor skills are not well - developed.
These reasons can range from fear of foods, not having age
appropriate oral motor skills to handle the foods, or experiencing a medical reason to turn away from food, such as reflux or dysphagia.
Stimulated by baby's oral experiences,
the oral motor skills of feeding typically unfold in a predictable sequence and build on each other.
After that, she says,
their oral motor skills advance quickly and parents should watch to see when their kids are ready to move from simple purees to more complex mixtures and eventually finger foods and table foods.
Second, I look closely at the child's
oral motor skills.
It is from 6 months of age in fact that the infants begin to develop
the oral motor skills necessary for normal child development.
It is great that he will take sips from an open cup, and I would suggest moving toward using the open cup and / or a straw cup (which is better for
oral motor skills than a sipper cup with a spout) for meals if he can manage it.
As a speech pathologist, I want children to have great
oral motor skills, and if a child has great oral motor skills, they are more capable of imitating speech sounds, words and sentences correctly.
As your baby grows into a toddler and preschooler, bubble play will take on new benefits - using two hands to hold the container and the wand,
oral motor skills to blow, fine motor skills to grasp the wand and more.
In fact this fun and simple bubble play activity provides significant development — Vision, hand - eye co-ordination, sensory development and gross, fine and
oral motor skills.
Most of the time, the answer is not that this child just wants to make his parents angry, but the answers, again, range from fear of food, medical reasons, or
oral motor skills that are not age appropriate for the child.
have
the oral motor skills needed to eat (meaning that they don't push food of the mouth but move it to the throat and swallow it)
He's had a ton of issues with
his oral motor skills, from poor muscle control / tone to hypersensitivity, and after the 20th occupational therapist inquired about his feeding patterns as a baby, I realized that it might not just have been that he preferred bottles with a fast flow nipple, and that his constant nursing strikes weren't because there wasn't enough milk — he simply couldn't suck hard enough to get that milk, thus he got frustrated and refused to empty my breast.
You can read my review of them here for more info and ideas on how to use baby food pouches to promote the development of baby's feeding /
oral motor skills.