I have an 18 month old son who will not (or maybe cannot) chew his food. Instead he just sucks on it until a)the food dissolves b)he gets tired of it and spits it out(he has had the same piece of turkey in his mouth for almost two hours, hiding on the roof of his mouth)or c) he get tired and falls asleep in his high chair. Sometimes it seems like he is in a trance while he is sucking his food. He also does not bite off pieces of food with his front teeth. He will either cram a big piece of food in his mouth or wait for someone to break it up for him.
He never had a problem with nursing or taking a bottle or even eating most solids, until we started introducing harder things like meat and bread. He has never been a baby with a strong need for sucking - he refused to take a binky and never nursed for comfort - he just wanted to get full and be done with it. BTW - he does have his back teeth and quite a few up front. Has anybody ever heard of this or had the same problem?
Thanks for all of the helpful advice. I took my son for his 18 month check up today and his pediatrician did recommend that we see an occupational therapist. He said that since there is no physical deformity of his mouth and he has plenty of teeth, his habit of sucking and storing his food is likely a learned behavior. He said that while he is likely to grow out of this phase, it may take a long time - possible up to 2 or 3 years. Since he is a thin kid to begin with, his doctor wants a therapist to help him relearn his eating-related behavior sooner, rather than later so he can begin to consume more calories (he went from about the 20% percentile to the 8th over the last 3 months, so it appears his lack of swallowing all of his food has affected his weight gain a bit.)Hopefully, this will resolve itself soon - I'll keep you posted. Thanks again for all of the insight and advice.
I have a nephew that did that around that age. He grew out of it after a while. I don't remember how long, but if i remember right it was around a year.
Target sells these great "feeders" wth mesh bags on the end that allow your child to suck on the food and get the nutients but not choke on the food...sounds like your sweetie would love them!!
B.
My nephew did that too, it made my sister really nervous. When she asked our mom about it (mom's an OB GYN) she said it was probably just a phase. Three weeks later he quit doing it. It turned out that he was getting two teeth in at a time and it hurt to chew.
L.-
I have a 2 year old son with the same problem. He pretty much has all his teeth as well. He did have acid reflux when he was a baby and he does not like to eat. He can eat things like applesauce and yogurt with no problem but if I give him a cookie he bites it, chokes on it, then either spits it out or ends up vomiting. We took him to a "feeding clinic" where a group of experts on chewing and swallowing food watched my son eat and their only suggestion was to cut everything up into very, very small portions until he can get used to the idea of chewing. He does not seem to have any problem eating crunchy foods if we chop them up for him. Something else we did was we gave him gummy bears to get him used to the idea of chewing food and that really seemed to help.
All babies develop differently. Maybe he just isn't hungry enough or isn't ready for those types of foods. He might need time to get used to the new foods you are giving him. My daughter used to just sit and mash her food but now she eats everything. When he is hungry enough, im sure he will eat.
my boys still do this at 5 and almost 3. It's the meat. if it's dry or he's sucked all the ketchup off of it then it's hard to swallow. I think he's too small to be biting meat pieces in half. He's too young to judge what he will choke on. I use the size of his fork and age to judge how big his pieces should be. He's also too small to know that drinking something will help wash it down. These are all learned skills not instinct.
at one all pieces of meat should only have one tine hole in them. at 2 then it could have 2,
Now be forewarned this won't stop him from shoving as much meat as possible into his mouth to the point that he can't chew or swallow.
Plus, they get a real kick out of making you gross out and the more you react to it the better. To keep this from happening we've limited the pieces of meat we actually put on their plate and made them take only one bite of meat then one of veggies before we would give them their milk back to drink.
