Pediatric Outpatient Feeding Program

The feeding program at Basal Therapies is an outpatient program consisting of once a week therapy sessions. It has a strong family component and requires daily practice and follow through at home.

Our feeding evaluation assesses a wide variety of components that may impact feeding in order to determine the best way to help you and your child make progress with developing a healthy relationship with foods and being able to eat a wide variety of foods.

We do not adhere to one specific feeding program due to each child and family having a unique set of needs, but instead pull from a wide variety of therapeutic trainings to best help each child and family.

The things that we assess at the time of the feeding evaluation include: sensory defensiveness, oral aversion, oral motor impairment, anxiety or trauma around eating, medical needs/referrals, tethered oral tissues, and developmental readiness for the expectations of oral eating.

We work with children and their families from birth to the age of 5. We work with older kids if there has been a choking or traumatic episode, the child has fallen off of their growth curve, or if the child is highly intrinsically motivated to change their eating habits.

If your child is over the age of 5, but has no desire to change their eating habits, we are available for private consultations to help you establish home routines and expectations to improve your child’s relationship with food and to set them up for success by ensuring they are hungry and ready to eat, and exposed to a variety of foods.

Our feeding program is 9-12 months in duration. At the end of 9-12 months, your therapy will be paused for both you and your child to have time to practice what you have learned during the previous months of therapy. Your therapist will give you clear direction for when/if to reach back out for another session of feeding therapy.

There is a food/supply fee of $2.50 per session that will be assessed at the time of each session, to assist with the cost of food that is provided and supplies used during the sessions.

To change feeding behaviors and habits as well as to build skills that are missing requires significant effort and support and it may not always be the right time to do feeding therapy. Consistency is required to make changes in an outpatient setting and is highly prioritized in our program. With that in mind, Basal Therapies has a minimum of 75% attendance per month required to remain in the feeding therapy program. If attendance drops below 75% in any given month, therapy will be paused and you will be placed back on the waitlist and can resume when the timing is better.

With an outpatient program, the bulk of the work and change comes from family follow through during the remainder of the week. There is an expectation that families follow through with recommendations/homework given by the therapist, if there is a lack of follow through at home your feeding therapy will need to be paused and you will go back on the waitlist until such time as you can commit to doing work during the week.