Mary Kostka explains why smells overwhelm children with feeding challenges and how to help. Keep clinics and homes scent-free, use preferred scents like lavender to calm, and try masking bad smells with cherry ChapStick under the nose. Graded exposure, like keeping food sealed in a Ziploc and gradually opening it, helps kids tolerate new foods.
Aloha. Welcome to day 19. We are continuing to talk about environmental ways that we can calm the child. What are some common environmental triggers? And so now we're on to scents. And it's so interesting. This is. This is a. This is kind of a big one. And I think a lot of it is the reason that a lot of kids struggle with feeding, because they just get overwhelmed by the sense of things. And we at Ohana have to have. We have to be so neutral in our. In our sense. I believe I mentioned that before, like, everything's washed and pre and clear. We don't wear perfumes. We just. We're just so aware of just keeping everything, everything neutral. Now, some kids do really well with. They'll calm with certain scents, you know, like maybe a lavender. A lot of people enjoy diffusers and essential oils. The main thing, I would say, is just pay attention to your child and really, really pay attention to if this scent is helping them or hurting them. But it can be a very, very big environmental trigger. And I just thought of a funny story. I have a friend that is so sensitive to smells and chemicals and different things. I went to visit her and she sniffed me. She just wanted to make sure I was safe to come in the house because she said if I had a bunch of stuff on her, that I'd have to go take a shower. I don't know where I would have taken the shower, but I thought that was kind of hilarious. But she was just very, very sensitive to anything that smelled. So anyway, that gives you an idea. There's just, you know, different things to think about. Think about. There's so many scents in so many things, whether it's in your soap, in your detergent, in foods, in different places that you go. So there are a lot of things you can do to kind of. Kind of deal with it if it's really hard. Besides, just, you know, eliminate what you can eliminate that's not comfortable. But it has worked with some kids to take some, like cherry Chapstick and then just, like, put it right under their nose. Or if they like Vicks, there's something they like the smell of, and then just put it right under their nose and then. Then it kind of blocks the other. The other. The other scents. And sometimes that'll work. I recently was working with a kiddo on. She couldn't even. Like, we do Food Explorer, like Food Detective, to get them kind of used to, like, exploring new foods. And so they'll describe, you know, is it hard? Is it soft? Does it break? Apart, what color is it? Just try to start interacting with it to just kind of see what that food is like. And she couldn't even come in the room. And so I found putting things in a Ziploc bag, then she could explore the food. And then what we did is we opened up a little tiny part of the bag, and I got kind of further away. And then as I got closer, I asked her when she could smell it. So basically, grade the activity down to where they can tolerate it. Adjust the noticeable but tolerable amount is how you can help kids get used to different things. Oh, some other scents you might consider that you might have are, like, candles, or if you have, like, air freshener in your car, air freshener in your. In your house, or just think of all the cleaning products. But generally speaking, I can tell you that most of our kids don't tolerate much of any of it. And we've just gone in our clinic to everything being free and clear of all. Of all dyes and fragrances, and they do a lot better. Okay, fill out your worksheet. And it's usually just one question, so it's pretty quick. And I really hope you're finding all this really helpful so far. If you haven't joined the community yet, please hop on there and introduce yourself and share your wins. A lot of times the wins are so simple. It's something as simple as I had my kiddo wear a hat in the grocery store, and they didn't have a meltdown or something like eliminating fragrances that I realized were triggering my child. Just sometimes the winds can be such simple little things that can make a big difference. And we really have to be detectives because typically they're getting bombarded with all these things. And so it takes a while to figure out, like, which are the things that are bothering them the most. But it's really a lot of times the easiest thing to. To deal with or to fix. Okay, aloha.
