01539 272034 SouthLakes.SLT@gmail.com

Tag: Top Tips

  • Top Tips for ‘Fussy Eating’

    Top Tips for ‘Fussy Eating’

    Between 25% and 45% of typically developing children struggle with feeding at some point during childhood.1 For children who find mealtimes challenging, there are universal strategies that can support positive mealtime skills. Try these top tips if you have a ‘fussy eater’ at your table.

    1. Pair New Foods with Familiar Foods

    If your child loves ketchup but isn’t sure about broccoli, serve broccoli with a side of ketchup so your child can dip their broccoli.

    2. Always Serve One Food Your Child Likes

    You don’t want your child to dread coming to the table, so serve at least one food item at each meal that you know your child likes. Make sure they have the other foods being served as a part of the meal on their plate as well.

    3. No Pressure, Except Positive Peer Pressure

    Meal times should be relaxed, pressure free, and include mealtime role-models. Research shows that children are more likely to eat non-preferred and new foods if they see their parents and other children eat them. 2 3

    4. Value Self-Feeding (Mess is Good!)

    Most people prefer to be in control over what goes in their mouth; let your child feed themselves, and save clean-up for when the meal has ended.

    5. Give Non-Preferred Foods Fun Names

    A study tested whether fun names (like ‘Power Punch Broccoli’) made vegetables more appealing to primary school students. Answer: Yes.4

    6. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

    It can take a child 15 to 20 separate meals seeing a new food before being ready to eat the new food; so keep offering non-preferred foods without pressure.

    7. Don’t Measure Nutrition by the Meal

    Look at what your child eats across a week to help decide if they are eating a balanced diet.

    8. Food Play is Important (Mess is Good!)

    Children need to play with and explore their food to learn how to eat; messy food play is a vital part of the learning process, encourage it!

    9. Food Prep is Fun – Give Children a Way to Help

    The more your child touches and helps prepare foods, the more likely they are to eat the food later.

    10. Make Mealtimes a Positive, Social Experience

    Eat as a family and turn off screens and other distractions.

    Many children are able to move beyond fussy eating through supportive family meals involving the above strategies. However, some children’s fussy or selective eating is underpinned by a specific difficulty or developmental difference, and these children need specialist support with feeding and mealtimes. If your child’s fussy eating is not improving with the implementation of universal strategies, please get in touch. Feeding therapy helps support children to develop positive mealtime skills and decreases mealtime stress for both parents and children.

    Please sign up for South Lakes Speech & Language Therapy’s newsletter if you would like future posts sent directly to your inbox.

    1. Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists ↩︎
    2. Haire-Joshu D, Elliott MB, Caito NM, Hessler K, Nanney MS, Hale N, Boehmer TK, Kreuter M, Brownson RC. High 5 for Kids: the impact of a home visiting program on fruit and vegetable intake of parents and their preschool children. Prev Med. 2008 Jul;47(1):77-82. doi: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2008.03.016. Epub 2008 Apr 9. PMID: 18486203; PMCID: PMC3607447. ↩︎
    3. Influence of Screen-Based Peer Modeling on Preschool Children’s Vegetable Consumption and Preferences Staiano, Amanda E. et al. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Volume 48, Issue 5, 331 – 335.e1 ↩︎
    4. Musher-Eizenman DR, Oehlhof MW, Young KM, Hauser JC, Galliger C, Sommer A. Emerald dragon bites vs veggie beans: Fun food names increase children’s consumption of novel healthy foods. J Early Child Res. 2011 Oct 1;9(3):191-195. doi: 10.1177/1476718X10366729. PMID: 26257583; PMCID: PMC4527653. ↩︎
  • Top Tips for Supporting Early Communicators

    Top Tips for Supporting Early Communicators

    Learning to communicate starts at birth. Babies and young children gain an understanding of communication by watching others around them and participating in meaningful interactions that support the development of early communication skills. Help your child develop their early communication skills with these top tips!

    1. Communication Starts with Attention

    Young children need to develop their attention to and interest in other people in order to learn how to effectively communicate. You can help your young child develop their attention by:

    • Reducing background noise and turning off the TV and other distractions when interacting with your child.
    • Practicing joint attention skills by focusing on something together during an interaction (e.g., looking at a book together).
    • When possible, creating predictable routines as a part of your child’s day such as bath, books, lullabies, then bed. Young children find it easier to attend and learn when they have the security of routines and know what to expect.

    2. Follow Your Child’s Lead

    Children learn best when they are interested and engaged in the interaction. By observing your child, you will learn what they are interested in; you then can respond to and expand on what your child enjoys to help develop new skills. For example, if your child enjoys rolling cars back and forth, you can sit with your child and roll cars while making a car noise (“vroom” or “beep-beep”).

    3. Be Face-to-Face when possible

    Children learning to communicate benefit from seeing the facial expressions of others as well as how sounds are formed when people move their mouths. Being face-to-face with your child gives them the best opportunity to learn these important communication skills from you.

    4. Practice ‘Serve and Return’ Interactions

    ‘Serve and return’ interactions occur when your child (or you) does something (‘serve’) and the other person does something back (‘return’). Games such as rolling a ball back and forth, peek-a-boo, making facial expressions or noises in turn, and taking turns dropping blocks into a container, are all communication building ‘serve and return’ interactions.

    5. Model Communication

    Children need to hear and see communication to learn to communicate; so talk with your child about what the two of you are doing together and what you see. Use simple language that your child understands, and include nonverbal communication such as facial expressions and gestures in your communicative interactions.

    6. Use Expectant Pauses

    During routine language interactions, pause and look at your child expectantly to encourage them to actively participate in the communicative exchange.

    For children not yet using words, try putting an expectant pause in a motivating interaction. For example, after pushing your child a few times on the swing, pause and look at your child expectantly to let them know you are waiting for them to tell you to keep pushing the swing. Your child may communicate this by making a noise, reaching, or looking toward you.

    If your child has newly started using words, use an expectant pause during a verbal routine such as a favourite song or familiar phrase. For example, just before releasing your child to go down the slide you might say “ready, steady…” and wait for your child to say “go!”.

    7. Offer Choices

    Offering your child a choice by holding up two objects is a great way to encourage communication. Children are naturally motivated to communicate when offered a desired item and giving a visual choice allows your child to communicate through reaching, pointing, vocalizing and/or verbalizing.

    8. Match Plus One

    When your child starts using words, use ‘match plus one’ to help them learn new words and start to build sentences. With ‘match plus one,’ you repeat what your child says and add one word or concept. For example:

    • Child: “Dog” Adult: “Big dog”
    • Child: “Mummy car” Adult: “Mummy’s red car”
    • Child: “Biscuit” Adult: “Eat biscuit”
    • Child: “Baby bed” Adult: “Baby is going to bed” or Baby is tired”

    9. Fewer Questions

    When children are early communicators, it is easy for adults to get in the habit of asking questions. However, for children not yet using words, answering questions is difficult. Plus children learn language by hearing others use language; hearing too many questions limits a young child’s language learning opportunities. Instead of asking your early communicator a question, comment on what he or she is doing. For example, instead of asking “What are you doing?” or “What do you have?”, comment “You are playing blocks” or “Wow, a big block tower!”.

    10. Limit Screen Time

    Babies and young children learn best from in-person, face-to-face interactions with you and other important people in their life. Limit screen time to video calls with friends and family so your early communicator has plenty of practice and learning time with face-to-face interactions.

    If you would like more information about children’s speech and language, please get in touch. Follow us on Facebook for more speech, language and feeding tips and sign up for South Lakes Speech & Language Therapy’s newsletter if you would like new posts sent directly to your inbox.

  • ‘What Did You Say?’ Top Tips for Communicating When Your Child’s Speech is Unclear

    ‘What Did You Say?’ Top Tips for Communicating When Your Child’s Speech is Unclear

    Top tips from South Lakes Speech & Language Therapy to support your child’s communication when their speech is unclear.

    1. Get Face-to-Face

    Whenever possible, get eye level with your child when communicating so they can see your mouth moving and how you are forming sounds. Being eye level also helps you and your child see all the clues about what is being communicated that we give through facial expressions and body language.

    2. Eliminate Background Noise

    Turn the radio off in the car and the TV off at home when you are speaking with your child. Children are most successful communicators when they are not competing with background noises and this will give you the best chance of correctly hearing your child’s message.

    3. Encourage Gestures

    If your child’s speech is unclear, encourage them to use gestures and other natural speech signs when talking to give listeners more clues about the message they are communicating. Makaton is another way to support young communicators.

    4. Offer Choices

    When possible, offer a young child two choices so they can communicate which they want. This gives you a better chance of understanding what they say since you already know the message possibilities.

    5. Ask Your Child to Tell You in a Different Way

    If you are struggling to understand your child’s message, ask younger children to show you or take you to what they are talking about when possible. Older children may be able to describe the target word if you prompt them by asking ‘What is it used for? or ‘Where do you find it?’. This could give you the clues you need to figure out their message.

    6. Give the Conversation Context

    If your child’s speech is unclear, ask specific questions such as ‘What was your favourite lesson today?’ or ‘Who did you play with at break time?’ instead of open ended questions such as ‘What did you do at school today?’. The more context you can give the conversation, the better chance you have at figuring out your child’s message.

    7. Instead of Correcting, Model

    If your child mispronounces a word, repeat the word back clearly using the correct
    pronunciation. For example, if your child says “Look, a gog!”, You could say, “Wow, that is a big dog!” while emphasizing the mispronounced sound.

    8. Admit when you Don’t Understand

    If your child has tried several ways to communicate their message and you cannot understand, let them know. Try to be reassuring and let them know that you are sorry that you cannot understand what they are saying.

    9. Keep a ‘Translation List’

    If there are particular words your child regularly says that people find difficult to understand, keep a list of the target words and how your child pronounces them. Share this list with your child’s teacher and family members to help your child be more easily understood by the people in their life.

    10. Get Specialist Support

    A 2021 study on speech intelligibility in children sampled children’s intelligibility at the single- and multiword levels. The study measured how well unfamiliar adults understood children at different ages without contextual clues; parents should expect to understand an even higher percentage of their child’s speech. The study found the following speech intelligibility norms:1

    • 25% intelligible by 3 years of age
    • 50% intelligible by 4 years of age
    • 75% intelligible by 5 years of age
    • 90% intelligible by 7 years of age

    If your child’s speech is difficult to understand and not meeting these intelligibility thresholds, consider seeking specialist support from a speech and language therapist; and if you have concerns for your child’s hearing, consider having their hearing tested.

    If you would like more information about children’s speech and language, please get in touch. Follow us on Facebook for more speech, language and feeding tips, and sign up for South Lakes Speech & Language Therapy’s newsletter if you would like new posts sent directly to your inbox.

    1. Hustad et al (2021 October 04) Speech Development Between 30 and 119 Months in Typical Children I: Intelligibility Growth Curves for Single-Word and Multiword Productions ASHAWire ↩︎
  • Ready to Wean – Top Tips

    Ready to Wean – Top Tips

    Top Tips from South Lakes Speech & Language Therapy to make weaning easier for you and your baby.

    1. Set Your Baby Up for Success

    Make sure your baby has a comfortable and supportive seat for feeding; and start by offering food at a time of day when your baby is well-rested and has a content belly. No one likes to try something new when they are uncomfortable, tired or overly hungry; and that includes your baby.

    2. No Pressure

    Early weaning is a time for babies to learn about food through play. Between 6 and 12 months breastmilk or infant formula will continue to be your baby’s primary source of nutrition as they learn about solid foods. Don’t worry if they don’t swallow much food when you start weaning; the most important thing is that they enjoy weaning and feel happy exploring a variety of solid foods.

    3. Mess is Good

    Babies need to explore and play with food in order to learn about it. This will be messy. To make clean up easier, put a plastic sheet under your baby’s chair and dress your baby in old (or no) clothing. Try offering food immediately before bath time.

    4. Calm is Key

    Your baby looks to you to help them regulate their emotions and know whether a new situation is safe. If you are calm around food, that lets your baby know that they can be calm around food too. If you feel anxious about weaning, your baby will too.

    5. Gagging will Happen

    Gagging is a normal part of weaning. It is the body’s way of preventing choking, and new feeders will gag while their body learns how to respond to and manage different food textures and sizes. Remember Top Tip number 4, ‘Calm is Key’.

    6. Be a Role Model

    Family meals are an important part of your baby learning to eat solid foods. Include your baby in family mealtimes so they can see you eat and learn about family foods and mealtimes. When possible, give your baby the same foods as the rest of the family so they start to develop a taste for family foods early on in their weaning journey.

    7. ‘No’ Doesn’t Always Mean No

    Babies and young children need multiple exposures to a food before developing a like or dislike for that food. So, if your baby makes an unhappy face the first time they taste broccoli, offer it again (and again) at different meals.

    8. Baby-Led vs Traditional Weaning

    Both weaning styles can lead to happy, healthy eaters; so do what works best for you and your baby, and don’t feel pressure to choose one method over the other.

    9. Store-Bought vs Homemade Baby Foods

    Store-bought baby foods are great for when you are out and about or short on time, but if you want your baby to eat family foods when they have transitioned to table foods, use
    predominantly family foods during weaning.

    10. Batch Cook and Freeze

    If you are making your own baby food, freeze it in ice cube trays so you have a variety of foods and flavours in small portion sizes ready to defrost and serve to your baby when you need it.

    For more information about weaning and children’s feeding, see South Lakes Speech & Language Therapy’s Information and Resources page and follow us on Facebook. Sign up to our newsletter if you would like new posts sent directly to your inbox. If you would like support with feeding your child, please get in touch.