What is it about?

Feeding problems affect most areas of a kid's life and development (toileting, sleep, learning). This should be fixed as young as possible, but proper treatment is only in a few special hospitals in the USA. This paper presents this treatment done in-home overseas. The kids made great improvements in their eating and drinking. Their parents kept it up themselves at home. The kids continued to eat/drink better after 2 years.

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Why is it important?

Proper feeding treatment can have rippling benefits, preventing risks to kids and waste of critical time and money. This is the first group treatment paper done in-home and without other treatments or disciplines. The results were many and real, like actual amount of food eaten in grams, actual pictures of the range of foods, and actual meals we watched and recorded. Kids were taught how to chew, feed themselves, and drink from a cup. This is the first controlled consecutive case series for feeding, and the research quality is high.

Perspectives

This is the most excited I have ever been about an article. I love the colourful pictures of real food the kids actually ate to show real life and easily relatable proof of the results. I also love the graphs joining the two worlds of single-case and group data. In the graphs, you can still see each kid's individual results instead of being lumped into the group. You can also see how big the change was for each kid. This was three years of my own hands-on personal direct close hard work with each kid and family in their homes, rather than a large hospital with lots of teams and supervising staff. It is an entirely different special experience, especially seeing the huge impact on the families' lives (seeing the kids eat with their siblings and family, at restaurants, at school). Finally, it was quite an experience getting this into a paediatric journal to try to reach a broader audience.

Dr. Tessa Taylor
University of Canterbury

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Controlled case series demonstrates how parents can be trained to treat paediatric feeding disorders at home, Acta Paediatrica, May 2020, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/apa.15372.
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