Hi,
Was your daughter a premie? Does she have any problems with chewing and swallowing?
My son ended up with PVL which is brain damage that causes the child to have poor muscle control. He was a year old and had ended up with pneumonia three times before they did a swallow study and discovered he had trouble swallowing. (He was even aspirating small amounts of formula into his lungs.)
I’m not saying this is the problem with your daughter, but it might be something to check into.
My son still gags on different textures of food, but a speech therapist was very beneficial in manipulating his facial and oral muscles. This made the muscles stronger and made eating easier for him.
They wanted to put a feeding tube in my son, but I asked them to give me a couple more months. I finally was able to get him to eat Ensure pudding. (I had to get it from a place in our state’s capitol, because there aren’t any stores in my town that carry it.)
Eating the Ensure pudding served two purposes, it provided him with the vitamins and calories he need, as well as, forced him to use the muscles in his mouth to manipulate food and swallow.
When I went back to the doctor, my son had maintained his weight, so I was able to continue feeding him orally. I started putting in his mouth tiny pieces of food that dissolved without having to be chewed . The second two things I found he would eat were soft tiny pieces of French fries and tiny bits of cheese puffs. Another mother found her son would eat over cooked broccoli with cheese sauce. The third thing my son ate was peas. I suggest you give her a taste of whatever you can get her to keep in her mouth. Follow that up with Pediatric Ensure or Pediatric Ensure pudding.
My son is still terribly thin, but after years of forcing him to take two bites of everything on his plate and following up with one of his favorite foods, he now has a pretty good list of foods that he will eat.
There are a few pediatric feeding disorder clinics in the U.S. If her regular pediatrician can’t find a physical reason for her lack of desire to eat much, you might check to see if there is a feeding disorder clinic in your state.
Hang in there. You are not alone and if there is nothing physically keeping her from eating, your persistence will pay off.
