Oral Motor Strengthening Exercises

When my daughter was born, she had low tone in her mouth. She wasn’t able to breast feed and struggled with a bottle because she could barely suck. Because she struggled to feed, she was put into the state’s Early Intervention Program and began feeding therapy. Many people ask me what the therapist did to help my daughter be able to gain the strength for everyday feeding skills. She did a couple things: oral motor exercises with her hand, oral motor exercises with therapy tools, and texture incorporation.

The oral motor exercises she did with her hand include:

1.      Taking her index finger and stretching the cheeks by moving her index finger from the top of the mouth to the bottom of the mouth gently stretching the inside of my daughter’s mouth. She did this on both sides slowly ten times each.

2.      Taking her middle finger and index finger, she did teeth compressions. She pushed down on the bottom teeth ten times and pushed up on the top teeth ten times.

3.      Taking both hands she would stretch the outside of the cheeks by starting at the cheek bone and pulling forward until my daughter made a pucker face with her lips. She did this ten times.

4.      Taking her index finger, she would rub in a downward motion the middle part of my daughter’s lip ten times.

The oral motor exercises that she did with a therapy tool (called a critter vibe and sometimes the z-vibe) include gently rubbing the tool around the outside of the face and then the inside of the mouth.

She then incorporated textured objects into the therapy session by giving my daughter several textured teething objects to play with. She would pick them up and rub them around her mouth and encouraged my daughter to do it on her own.

One thing she also encouraged was a pacifier. She said that practice makes perfect and if we could encourage her to suck on the pacifier, over time her suck would get stronger.

At the end of the session the therapist would work with my daughter on eating food. She started with the bottle. At 7 months we began puree food, and a little over a year she started finger foods. My daughter did struggle with gagging while feeding but the therapist just encouraged giving her smaller amounts.

I hope this information might be helpful for others that are on this journey too. If you think your child needs feeding therapy, contact your local Early Intervention Program. A speech therapist can then teach you how to do this at home. Your child will progress more if you and the therapist work together and give the child therapy daily.