Feeding and Swallowing Support
At Nourish, Feed & Thrive we feel passionate about making your families feeding journey fit with your values and needs. We make no judgement, we listen and provide support using Responsive Parenting principles. Would you like help breastfeeding you baby? Great! Is bottle feeding the best option for your family? Excellent! Would you like to have the flexibility of offering both? No problem! Want to understand what food and drink are safe for right now? We got you!
Our service offers mobile, clinic based supports, which means that we can come to you at your home or visit your child in their daycare/school. We will work with you to develop a flexible plan to best meet your needs.
How we can help you and your child
Makaela draws on over 15 years of experiences in assessing and managing swallowing difficulties to determine the cause of the feeding difficulties and then works with you to make a plan that fit with your family. Our interventions are tailor made for each individual child and draw from Gold Standard paediatric feeding interventions including:
- Supporting oral feeding in fragile infants (SOFFI)
- Responsive feeding and Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID)
- Sequential-Oral-Sensory (SOS) including Tube Weaning
- International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC)
Feeding Therapy
Breastfeeding
Breastfeeding is natural process, but that doesn't mean that it is always going to be easy. The truth is that breastfeeding is a learned skill for both mumma and baby. Even if this isn't your first baby, each mother and baby pair is unique.
If your baby is fussy and constantly pulling on and off, if you experience pain during feeds or if you are just unsure if you baby is getting enough milk. We can help.
With dual training as a lactation consultant and speech pathologist, we can offer you in-depth assessment and treatment planning.
Bottlefeeding
Bottle refusal is a thing, and it can be very distressing. Before you go and buy every fancy 'boob mimicking' bottle on the market, let us work with you to understand why your baby might be refusing, coughing or pulling away from the bottle and what we can do to help.
In an ideal world every new parent would be shown what is considered 'best practice' for using a bottle (you might be surprised to learn that it doesn't include lying your baby flat in your arm and popping the bottle down into their mouth), but that doesn't happen. We can walk you through the process so that hopefully you never have to experience and overcome a bottler aversion
Transitioning to solids
You had no issues with purees and baby was a champion eater but now baby is coughing, gagging, refusing or throwing anything that has lumps in it. We hear this all the time.
We will do a thorough assessment of the structures of your babies face, mouth and throat and then assess their function while they are eating. This allows us to pin point why this little one might not be progressing with food textures in a way that we would expect. Having a deep understanding of how we develop our eating skills and where the breakdowns can occur, means we have the best chance of getting your little one back on track to enjoying a wide variety of tastes and textures as they grow.
Anxious and Avoidant eaters
If meal times are becoming a time of stress and anxiety, then it is time to reach out for help. If you child has a very restricted range of food they are happy to eat (usually white, crunchy 'unhealthy foods'), then asking for help early can make a world of difference.
As parents we have such a strong instinct to feed our children 'the right types of foods', so that their brains and bodies can grow and develop. We can help you to understand the science behind why some children become 'fussy or anxious eaters' and how we can work together to make it easier and ultimately bring back some peace and joy to mealtimes.
Adult swallowing difficulties / Dysphagia
Adults can also experience swallowing difficulties. Difficulties may be caused by aging or a medical condition such as:
- stroke
- Parkinson's disease
- Multiple sclerosis
- Motor neuron disease (MND)
- Traumatic brain injury
- Cerebral palsy
- Head and neck cancer and other conditions.
Makaela, Gabby and Bec all worked in adult acute and rehabilitation delivering swallow assessment and intervention for may year before moving into the paediatric space. We have the knowledge, skills and training to support adults and we still love offering swallowing to support to our older friends too.