Feeding Therapy

Nov 12, 2011
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mom of 4 yr. old
by: Lynn

My daughter has SPD, speech, hearing, vision, GERD, and sleep issues, which have been and are being addressed. At age 1 we knew that she had feeding issues and in hindsight had feeding issues as an infant. Because of her speech she received speech therapy at age 1.

By age 3, she had made some progress, but her therapist asked me what I was willing to do to help her with her feeding issue. She enlightened me to feeding therapy. It took a long time to get from the point of saying "We are willing to do the therapy" to actually beginning. We had struggles with the insurance company, but decided to forget about them and forge ahead without their consent. Eventually, they caught up with us and most was covered (even though it had originally been denied). We had been willing to take out loans to pay for feeding therapy - we had to do this for our child.

She was evaluated at Helen Devos Children Hospital's Intensive Feeding Clinic and was placed on a 14 month long waiting list. The program is 2 months long and meets 5 days a week for 8 hours each day. We were thrilled that our daughter was on the list, it gave us hope. In the interim, HDCH staff guided us to Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Center which they work very closely with. MFB has an outpatient feeding therapy program. We decided to have our daughter evaluated once again. MFB got her in much faster than HDCH and she started outpatient feeding therapy at age 4.25. She worked 2 times per week for 6 months before she was discharged. She needed to learn how to eat. They used various techniques to teach her as well as gave us tools to use at home to help her. When her therapist first mentioned feeding therapy to us, we thought we would have to leave the state for the therapy.

There are very few places that have such therapy. When dealing with our large pediatricians office we found out that none of the staff knew feeding therapy existed, until we advocated for it for our daughter. It turns out, we were able to take our daughter 1 hour from our home to Grand Rapids, MI for therapy. She will be featured on the MFB website next year as a sort of poster child for their feeding program.
Although she still has issues with self feeding, she loves cooked vegetable, rice, potatoes, meats, and is willing to try new things.

I responded to this blog because in my search to find more information to help my daughter in other areas I came across your comment. I know our lives were changed because a young therapist, with little field experience, went the extra mile to find something to help us. In my opinion, feeding therapy is at least worth a try. If you are in the situation anything like us, you are to a point that you are willing to try anything that might help. We finally found something that did.

GOOD LUCK!

Feeding Therapy

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Feeding Therapy