Feeding Tubes for Children: Benefits, Challenges, and Pathways to Weaning

Feeding tubes provide essential nutrition for children who cannot eat by mouth, offering life-saving support while addressing medical needs, but understanding their benefits, potential complications, and the process of transitioning off them is crucial for families and caregivers.

Feeding provide a way for kids to get the nutrition they need by bypassing the swallowing process entirely. In fact, it’s estimated that 2.7–5.6% of children rely on feeding tubes for their nutrition. Common indications for tube feeding include feeding disorders and nutritional needs related to prematurity, neurodevelopmental disorders, congenital malformations, metabolic disorders, and chromosomal abnormalities.

However, feeding tubes can come with some challenges, including:

• Increased risk of medical complications

• Higher healthcare costs

• Delayed swallow development

• Food aversions

• Difficulty with hunger regulation

• Missed opportunities during critical developmental windows

For these reasons, when it’s possible, transitioning a child off a feeding tube can be a great step forward. Speech-language pathologists can use a variety of strategies—or a combination of approaches—to help children move toward oral eating.

Every plan good tube weaning plan should be tailored to the child’s unique needs and family circumstances.

If you’d like to learn more about tube weaning or ways to improve your child’s oral eating while they’re using a feeding tube, we’d love to help! Contact us through our website, we’re here to chat.

Why We Say No Sippy Cups & What To Do Instead

Children are ready to drink from a cup between five and seven months of age. Sippy cups are often the first cup children are given. Parents and caregivers give children sippy cups because the cups allow children to easily consume liquid without spilling. BUT Sippy cups and spouted cups are NOT recommended. Here is why:

• Children drink from sippy cups/ spouted cups in the same way they drink from bottles. Therefore the use of a sippy cup can prevent children from developing a mature swallow pattern.

• Sippy cups/ spouted cups do not promote the development and strengthening of the orofacial muscles and structures that we use for speech.

• Often when children drink from sippy cups, liquid is left in the mouth. This can lead to tooth decay.

Instead of sippy cups, children should first be introduced to cup drinking via an open cup. Open cups are most similar to breastfeeding, as the cup rests along the bottom lip similar to a breast. Then between six and 12 months of age children should be introduced to straw drinking. To ensure that children continue to develop a mature swallow pattern when straw drinking, keep the straw at the tip of the mouth away from the tongue. Avoid allowing the straw to hold the tongue tip down. 

Children having trouble transitioning from breast or bottle feeding to an open cup and or straw should see a speech-language pathologist. Green Light offers in-home feeding therapy covered by most major insurance companies. Green Light evaluations get to the root of the issue, while treatment is individualized and includes parent coaching to ensure that parents are able to support their child throughout the week. For more information, reach out to Green Light!

Help Your Picky Eater in 3 Steps

Picky eating can be very frustrating! It leads to meal times filled with tension, anxiety, and often tears. But, all hope is not lost. Use the three steps below to help your little become more accepting of new foods:

• Expose: Introduce your child to new foods in environments where there is NO pressure to eat (eg the grocery store, a farmer’s market, when gardening).

• Explore: Help your child get to know the foods through activities. Allow them to help with cooking, have them add toppings to different foods, allow them to dip familiar foods (eg crackers) into new dips, etc.

• Expand: Gradually make the foods more complex by adding new ingredients to accepted foods.

Here is an example of how these steps often play out: Say your child is adverse to vegetables, specifically potatoes and cauliflower. Take them to a grocery store or a farmers market. Create positive memories. Allow them to look at and touch the vegetables. Have them help you put the vegetables in the cart and wash them when you get home. At home make a sweet potato bar or mashed potatoes. Put out various toppings for your child to add. Include foods that they like and foods that they have not accepted (e.g. cheese, chocolate chips, and cauliflower). When adding the toppings your child will touch accepted AND unaccepted foods without a fight. Overtime your child’s guard will come down and they will go in for a bite of the potato or pop a cauliflower floret in their mouth.

If you have a picky eater at home and are in need of help, reach out to Green Light!