feeding therapy for
Children diagnosed with Autism
Your child eats six things and the list keeps shrinking. Every suggestion you've been given — hide it in a smoothie, don't make a fuss, they'll eat when they're hungry — has either failed or made mealtimes worse.
we don't treat autism. we treat the feeding difficulty.
Autism isn't a feeding diagnosis. Autistic children come to us with quite different eating difficulties, and the first thing we do is work out which one we're actually looking at. A child who gags on anything with texture needs a different plan from a child who eats a wide range of textures but only one brand, on one plate.
So we assess the feeding problem itself. The autism diagnosis then changes how we work, not what we're working on.
The plan follows the child in front of us, not the label on their file.
what tends to be different
Not every neurodivergent child has all of these, and plenty of neurotypical children have some. These are the patterns we plan around.
Sensory experience is the problem, not fussiness
A texture that reads as unremarkable to you can be genuinely intolerable. Wet against dry. A lump in something smooth. When a child gags on mashed potato, that gag is real — it isn't performance, and it doesn't respond to encouragement.
Sameness is doing a job
The same plate, the same brand, the same order. From outside it looks like inflexibility. From inside it's usually the thing making eating possible at all. We don't start by taking it away.
Hunger cues can be unreliable
Some children don't register hunger and fullness in the usual way. Which is why "they'll eat when they're hungry enough" isn't just unhelpful — for some children it isn't true, and following it can be unsafe.
Distress may not arrive as words
A child who can't say "that smell is making me feel sick" will show it another way, and that way often gets read as behaviour. We watch for the earliest signals rather than waiting for distress.
how we work
We never ask for the scary thing. We find something your child can already do — touching a food, smelling it — and move in steps small enough that they barely notice the ground has moved. Nothing is forced and nothing is hidden.
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The ladder is the same. What changes is everything around it.
The environment is part of the plan — lighting, noise, seating, who else is in the room. Sessions follow a shape your child can learn, so the food is the only new thing. Nothing is sprung. Your child knows what's coming.
Home sessions are often the right call, because the mealtime we're trying to change is the one at your own table.
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No. We work with plenty of children who have no diagnosis, and with children whose assessment is still in progress. Nothing we do waits on a piece of paper.
Earlier is easier, but there's no age at which it's too late. If mealtimes are distressing, the list of foods is shrinking, or you're worried about growth, that's reason enough to ask.
If any of this sounds like your child, talk to us.
