Brief spoken tutorial by Ming (Agents of Speech) advising that after addressing sensory needs, clinicians/caregivers should teach oral motor skills for eating. Recommends removing or modifying difficult foods (e.g., cut large pieces, progress size), graded practice for challenging items (e.g., bones), and targeted oral motor exercises (e.g., using chewy tubes to train molar chewing).
When oral motor is a problem, once you have done, finished and managed the sensory needs, the next step is to teach them the correct motor skills in order to eat. If something that they eat is very difficult to manage, you have to remove all the hard, difficult things that they cannot manage for them. So for instance, if it's a really big piece of chicken, cut it up in smaller pieces and then gradually increase the size of it. Okay? Or if it's like teaching them to manage bones, what you can do is to go from big bone to a small bone and slowly teach them to manage by controlled practice. This is what we do for helping them during the feed eating process, during the meal time. And what we can do other than that is oral motor exercises. Taking the whole motor process of chewing and eating and breaking it down into smaller parts and doing that as a oral motor exercise is valuable. For instance, if your child doesn't know how to chew with their molars, like the big teeth at the back, then what you can do is use talk tools like a chewy tube and teach them to go up and down and chew so that they learn that chewing requires the muscles here and the process of going up and down.
