Food Play Group for 4-6 Year Olds

Food Play Group is a collaborative allied health initiative that includes an Occupational Therapist, Taylah Cabrera from Finding Foundations, and a Paediatric Dietitian, Kate Annat from Cubs Paediatric Dietetics. Our focus is on assisting families and children dealing with selective eating. 

Before joining the group, an initial assessment will be conducted by Finding Foundations, Cubs Paediatric Dietetics, or Brisbane Feeding Clinic to determine the suitability of your child. Some children may not be ready for group participation or may require individualised support. If you are already known to us, we don’t require an initial assessment.  

As clinicians, our primary goal is to address the underlying reason for your child’s feeding challenges, before introducing group based feeding therapy. This could include concerns related to airway, posture and gross motor skills, allergies, nutritional deficiencies or oral motor skills. It is crucial to address these areas first as they are the starting point for your child feeling well, having stronger appetite, and feeling more ready to engage with food.  Please refer to my Feeding Therapy page regarding for a more indepth summary of what to expect.

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Our therapeutic approach is based on the SOS Approach to Feeding, Responsive Feeding, and the Division of Responsibility by Ellyn Satter. This means that our first goal is to empower parents to recognize their child's readiness cues and teach them when to support their child in being exposed to new foods.

This might look like understanding the anxieties around food-related tasks (such as touching, smelling, holding, and eating) and learning how to give them the space and independence to interact with new foods at their own pace. 

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For the children, our aim is to expose them to new foods through play, creating positive experiences that lead to acceptance. 

The therapy plan includes the following sessions: 

Session 1: 

Both parents and children participate, with one clinician engaging in play with the children, while the other supports parents in understanding cues and communicating with their child. This equips families with skills they can apply at home. 

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Our goal in session one is to use play based methods to get children to start interacting with foods. We will be teaching the parents on how to observe their child's cues as to when they may feel overwhelmed by the level of interaction with the food they are participating. Here is where we go up the 32 steps to eating. Observe their cues, then we reduce the level of exposure to allow the child to recover before building up the steps again. 

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Sessions 2-4: 

Both clinicians participate in feeding therapy, guiding children to interact with foods at their own pace. Parent will be nearby observing. 

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Each week we will be doing a new food based play activity with the child where we bring them up and down the steps to eating. In doing so our goal is to demonstrate to the families that this method of exposure can be applied to any mealtime at home.

Remember it is not necessarily the food they are saying no to, but the degree of interaction we are asking of your child. For example they might say no passing the food to another child but would be willing to pass that same food with a fork. 

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Session 5: 

In the final session, we encourage both parents and children to participate, providing families with the opportunity to practice feeding therapy skills with their children, ready to apply them at home. 

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Here we will encourage families to bring their child up the steps to eating, watch for their cues and then reduce the level of exposure at their own pace. In this we hope to provide families with the skills to apply these techniques at home.