Feeding therapy.

Are you having trouble with breast or bottle feeding, or is the transition to solid foods a challenge? Do you notice your child pocketing foods or gagging when eating? Are mealtimes becoming particularly stressful for your family? Have doctors told you for years that your child will “grow out of it” but you are concerned that the endless cycle of chicken nuggets and french fries is impacting your child’s nutrition? If so, your child may benefit from a feeding evaluation. We specialize in the evaluation and treatment of a wide variety of feeding and swallowing impairments. We offer services in your home, the most natural environment in which to target mealtimes. These evaluations will address concerns related to your child’s feeding, swallowing, and oral-motor skills including picky eating, concerns with weight gain/growth, food or bottle refusal, difficulty breast feeding, issues transitioning to solids, texture aversions, oral motor weaknesses, gagging/coughing during eating, and any other difficulties leading to stressful and/or prolonged mealtimes.

Feeding and swallowing disorders can result from motor weakness, sensory difficulties, and behavioral issues, or most often, a combination of these factors. These disorders can make it difficult for children to get the nutrition they need or to transition to age-appropriate foods. We have specific training in feeding premature and fragile infants, breastfeeding, oral motor techniques, the SOS approach to feeding, behavioral feeding, and neuromuscular feeding impairments, and have extensive experience working with a variety of diagnoses impacting feeding skills, including the following:

• history of prematurity

• autism spectrum disorder

• developmental delay

• gastroesophageal reflux disease

• food allergies or intolerance

• craniofacial anomalies/cleft palate

• genetic syndromes

• neurological impairment

  Have questions or concerns regarding your child’s current feeding skills? Contact us today for a free phone consultation to discuss your child’s needs and preliminary recommendations.

Speech therapy.

Is your child difficult to understand? Does he or she omit or substitute incorrect sounds? Is he or she becoming frustrated - or speaking less - because certain sounds are difficult to produce? Does your child have difficulty imitating longer sentences or sequencing sounds or words together? By the age of 3 years, your child’s speech should sound more like an adult than a toddler. If you have concerns that your child has difficulty producing age-appropriate sounds, he or she may benefit from speech therapy. At Eat Talk Learn, we believe in an individualized, multi-sensory approach to speech therapy. Some children respond better to visual or verbal cues, while others may need physical cues to produce certain sounds. We are trained in the PROMPT method (Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets), and have extensive experience working with children across a wide age range with articulation impairments and motor speech problems. We create treatment plans aiming to improve your child’s verbal output and speech skills in order to enhance his or her communication skills at home, in school, and with peers. We work with a wide variety of speech difficulties including the following:

• childhood apraxia of speech

• dysarthria (muscle weakness causing slurred or imprecise speech)

• lisps

• articulation disorders

• phonological process disorders

If you think your child’s speech may be delayed, contact us for more information and an initial phone consultation.

Language therapy.

Are you concerned that your child has fewer words or shorter sentences than his or her peers? Does your child have difficulty making friends or following directions, or is your child beginning to get frustrated at his or her difficulty communicating? Does your child have trouble comprehending what you say or what he or she reads? Have you been told that your child struggles with “executive functioning” skills? Is your child struggling to retell stories or events? If any of the above sound familiar, your child may benefit from language therapy. At Eat Talk Learn, we believe that communication is a fundamental right for every person, and we will work to support your child’s unique language needs.

We have extensive experience working in a variety of settings with children ranging from infants through teenagers who struggle with the production or comprehension of spoken and written language. We are trained in the Lindamood Bell Visualizing and Verbalizing program for language/reading comprehension and the “Social Thinking” program, and have specific training in executive functioning skills development, pediatric brain injury, and dyslexia and phonemic awareness difficulties. We offer skilled expertise working with the following populations and diagnoses:

• expressive and receptive speech delay/disorder

• pragmatic (social) language difficulties

• executive functioning deficits

• limited vocabulary

• difficulties resulting from concussion/traumatic brain injury

• pre-literacy difficulties (e.g. rhyming, blending sounds) and early reading problems

• reading comprehension problems

• auditory processing difficulties

• narrative language difficulties

Please contact us today for more information regarding language-based learning difficulties and the services we can provide to help support your child.