Helping a Child with Tactile Defensiveness Overcome Eating Challenges
Tactile defensiveness can pose significant challenges for children when it comes to eating. Sensory sensitivities can make mealtimes overwhelming and stressful. However, with patience, understanding, and a strategic approach, parents and caregivers can help their children overcome tactile defensiveness and develop a healthier relationship with food.
Understanding Tactile Defensiveness
Tactile defensiveness, or tactile hypersensitivity, is a condition where individuals experience an overreaction to certain tactile stimuli. For children with tactile defensiveness, the textures, temperatures, and physical sensations associated with food can trigger aversive responses, making eating a daunting task. It is important to remember that each child’s experience is unique, and their aversions may vary.
Create a Calm and Supportive Environment
Creating a calm and supportive environment during mealtimes is crucial for helping a child with tactile defensiveness. Reduce distractions, such as loud noises or bright lights, that may heighten their sensory overload. Establish a predictable routine and provide clear expectations. Encourage positive associations with food by incorporating enjoyable activities or storytelling into mealtimes.
Gradual Exposure to New Foods
Introducing new foods gradually is key to helping a child with tactile defensiveness expand their palate. Start with small portions of unfamiliar foods and pair them with preferred items. Please encourage them to gradually explore the new food with their senses, allowing them to touch, smell, and interact with it without pressure to eat. Celebrate any progress made, regardless of how small it may seem.
Food Texture Modifications
Food textures can be particularly challenging for children with tactile defensiveness. Modifying the textures of certain foods can help make them more manageable. Pureeing or blending foods to create smoother textures or offering crunchy alternatives like vegetable sticks instead of raw fruits can provide more tolerable options for children with tactile sensitivities.
Consulting with Occupational Therapists
Occupational therapists specializing in sensory processing can provide valuable guidance and strategies tailored to your child’s needs. They can offer techniques to desensitize their tactile sensitivity over time and suggest activities to improve sensory integration. Collaborating with these professionals can significantly enhance your child’s progress and overall well-being.
Helping a child with tactile defensiveness overcome eating challenges requires patience, understanding, and a supportive approach. By creating a calm environment, gradually introducing new foods, and seeking professional assistance, parents can empower their children to develop healthier relationships with food.
Have You Ever Been Nervous About Starting Something New? I Am!
Have you ever been so nervous to start something new? I am utterly terrified to start blogging and sharing my experiences. I have always wanted to start this blog, but I’m utterly terrified, if I’m being honest! I have always had a running dialogue in my mind every day. I know I’m not the most graceful writer, so I kept having doubts about myself and wondering whether or not I should start this blog. I often wondered, what do I have to offer? Will I be embarrassed with what I put out there? Will I offend anyone? Is someone going to make a mean comment? What will my family think? For a long time, these questions ran through my mind repeatedly. I always kept delaying the start of this blog even though I had wanted to do it for over a year.
I started a blog because I wanted to find a community going through some of the same things I am. I would be a part of a community of parents who have a child with tactile defensiveness, ADHD, or anxiety. I would love to get new ideas and suggestions from other parents dealing with these situations. At the same time, I may have ideas that can help others.
Finally, I just told myself that I needed to go for it. I don’t know about you, but sometimes, getting out of my head is just so hard. I told myself that I needed the courage to put myself out there. Try starting a new blog and see what happens. If I don’t even try, I will never know whether or not I could have done it. I would want to try and fail than not try at all.
So, for all of you nervous about starting something new, I encourage you to go for it. You will never know if you can do it if you don’t go for it. Let me know in the comments! I would love to hear what makes you nervous to start something new.
Learning to Walk With Tactile Defensiveness
After our son was diagnosed with tactile defensiveness, we had much to learn. As parents, we needed to understand what tactile defensiveness was. Neither my husband nor I had ever heard of it before. We also needed to know what we could do at home to help him. We also had to educate our families on it. No one in our families had heard of it either.
Our number one concern after his diagnosis was helping him learn to walk. It took us almost five months to achieve this goal, from the diagnosis to his being able to walk on his own. We took these steps as parents to help him learn to walk.
1. Physical Therapy
We would go to physical therapy regularly. We would never have known what to do if we hadn’t kept going. There were so many different activities at physical therapy that they would do with our son. I can’t remember everything that they did, but the one thing that they used was hanging beads. All they would do is have our son put his feet under these hanging beads, and they would make them swing across his feet. At first, he hated this, but eventually, he got used to it. They always gave us this to do at home when we went to therapy.
2. Brushing His Feet
One of the primary activities the therapist would have us do at home was brushing our son’s feet. It sounds a little weird, and you probably wonder what that is. Our therapist gave us this little sponge that was soft on one side, and on the other side, it had tiny bristles. All we would do would take his feet, and with the bristle side of the sponge, we would brush his feet. We would constantly brush up and down across the bottom of his feet. He did not like this feeling at all. It took a couple of weeks to get used to the sensation on the bottom of his feet.
3. Going Barefoot
We only took him outside in his bare feet for this one. We would have him touch his feet on different textures. We put his feet on the cement or in the sand. We would try anything we could think of that would feel foreign to him. The one he hated the most was the grass. It took him a long time to be comfortable touching the grass with his feet.
4. Using a Walker
The last thing that the therapist had us do was use a walker. He needed the walker to get strength in his legs. You have to realize that he had never stood up on his legs at this point. When moms take their babies, hold them up on their laps, and stand up, you look at the baby while helping them stand. My son never did that. You never realize how that tiny little thing was such a big deal. Since he had never stood on his legs, they were weak. We used the tiniest little gold walker you would have ever seen. It only took him about a week to learn how to use the walker, and then he was off. We couldn’t slow him down after that. He used the walker for a couple of months.
After months of doing these things, our son finally started walking independently. It was the best day of his life when he could finally walk without any help. Walking hasn’t been his only setback. He also had to learn how to touch things with his hands. To this day, eating has been and continues to be the biggest obstacle. Please read my other posts about the strange things we would do for him to get used to touching things and eating.
