Monkey Mouths provides fun, professional and comprehensive feeding services tailored to your child’s individual needs.
Monkey Mouths adopts a comprehensive approach to feeding therapy. Our speech pathologists and occupational therapists meticulously evaluate medical history, feeding skills, oral-motor abilities, dietary considerations, and behavioral aspects. We craft personalized plans for lasting feeding success.
Sensory Feeding at Monkey Mouths addresses disorders impacting a child’s diet. Picky eating, often stemming from medical, developmental, or trauma issues, is tackled by our skilled therapists. We employ family-centered, sensory, and trust-based approaches. If your child shows signs of ARFID, we provide screening and collaborate with their medical team for comprehensive care.
Medical Feeding challenges, known as dysphagia, impact a child’s safety and health. Symptoms like choking or refusal to eat signal a problem. We support tube feeding, oral feeds, and transitioning, ensuring optimal nutrition and family goals are met.
NMES (Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation) at Monkey Mouths enhances safe swallowing by improving muscle strength. Our trained therapists use FDA-approved systems, like Vital Stim and Amp Care, ensuring it’s well-tolerated, even by infants. If your child exhibits signs of aspiration or swallowing issues, consult with our feeding therapist to explore the suitability of NMES.
Discover Oromyofunctional Therapy (OMT) at Monkey Mouths, addressing tongue placement issues in rest, swallow, and speech. Our skilled speech pathologists evaluate and offer personalized re-patterning therapy for optimal oral functions.
Monkey Mouths offers Fiberoptic Endoscopic Evaluation of Swallowing (FEES), a safe, radiation-free alternative to a hospital-based barium swallow study. It is convenient, cost-effective, and uses your child’s regular food.
Picky eating is a common part of childhood. Most children go through phases of refusing certain foods, but over time they gradually learn to accept a wider variety of foods and textures. A feeding disorder looks different. It’s more persistent, it limits the types or amounts of food your child will eat, and it can start to affect their nutrition, growth, or ability to enjoy family meals. If mealtimes feel like more of a struggle than a phase, we’re here to help you figure out what’s really going on.
If eating, drinking, or swallowing safely has moved beyond a typical developmental phase and is starting to impact your child’s health, growth, skill-building, or day-to-day life, it’s time for an evaluation. Our feeding therapists can help you understand what’s going on and build a plan that works for your family.
Probably not. While many children go through a phase of picky eating, most still eat around 30 different foods. A diet limited to fewer than 15–20 foods is considered a red flag for a pediatric feeding disorder and may indicate underlying sensory, oral-motor, or medical challenges that feeding therapy can address.
If your child gags often, gags on foods they’ve eaten before without trouble, avoids entire textures, or mealtimes are consistently stressful, it’s worth a closer look. A feeding evaluation helps us pinpoint whether sensory, oral-motor, or medical factors are behind it and how to help.
Yes! Meat is genuinely one of the toughest foods for little mouths to manage. It takes strong chewing skills, coordinated tongue movements, and the ability to handle a tougher texture. Some kids avoid it because their jaw tires out, some because of oral-motor difficulty or sensitivity to taste and texture, and some because of a past gagging or choking scare. Our therapists can figure out what’s driving the avoidance and help your child build the skills and confidence to give meat another try.
Absolutely. Our feeding therapists work closely with families to help tube-fed children build the comfort, safety, and oral-motor skills needed to transition toward eating by mouth, when it’s medically appropriate.
It can be. Holding food in the cheeks or mouth instead of swallowing raises the risk of choking and tooth decay. It is usually a sign of an underlying oral-motor or sensory feeding difficulty rather than simple behavior, and an evaluation can help us get to the root cause and treat it.
Choking is something to take seriously. It can come from difficulty chewing thoroughly, trouble coordinating a swallow, an underlying medical condition, or foods that are not quite developmentally appropriate yet. If your child chokes repeatedly, coughs often during meals, or seems to struggle while swallowing, we recommend a feeding evaluation to identify the cause and help keep mealtimes safe.
Too much milk can crowd out your child’s appetite for solid foods and, over time, lead to nutritional gaps. It can also delay the oral-motor skills your child needs to chew and manage age-appropriate textures.
Yes, and it is one of the things we love helping families work through. We start by identifying what’s really behind the refusal — sensory sensitivities, oral-motor difficulty, a medical issue, or a tough past feeding experience — and then use evidence-based, child-centered strategies to help your child feel safe with new foods, build the skills to eat them, and gradually grow their diet.
It really depends on your child — their needs, what’s driving the difficulty, and how long it’s been going on. Some kids make big strides in just a few months; others with more complex feeding challenges benefit from a longer journey. Whatever the timeline, we will build an individualized plan with your family and celebrate every win along the way!
