What Occupational Therapists Need to Know: Restrictive Eating and Pathological Demand Avoidance Part 4 | Ep. 161

About this episode

This episode discusses strategies for therapists working with children who have restrictive eating issues, based on the host's personal experience with her son.

This is the fourth episode in my series on PDA and restrictive eating, and this one is for therapists. If you are an occupational therapist, a speech language pathologist, or another type of therapist working with a child who isn't responding to gentle, play-based, sensory-based, or exposure-based feeding approaches the way you'd expect, this episode designed to help you. I share the full arc of my older son Cooper's journey with extremely restrictive eating, from the time he was four and a half years old and eating primarily three processed foods, through five years of occupational therapy, to where he is today. I walk through how we adapted the SOS feeding protocol over time to incorporate autonomy, equality, lower demands, play, and connection to special interests. I also share five specific strategies you can bring into your sessions. Key Takeaways The Sensory Lens Is Not Enough | 00:02:04 I share how Cooper's restrictive eating was initially understood through a sensory lens, and how, for about a year and a half, that framing guided his therapy. But the sensory lens alone was not sufficient to explain the patterns I was seeing or to help him expand his eating. What I came to…

People in this episode

Host: Casey

Topics covered

• occupational therapy
• restrictive eating
• pathological demand avoidance
• feeding strategies
• child development

Keywords

• restrictive eating
• occupational therapy
• PDA
• feeding approaches
• therapist strategies

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SOS feeding protocol, occupational therapy, speech language pathology

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