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Feeding

Nina

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone could offer any practical advice! I have a 3 and a half year old son, Alex, who is autistic and I am really strugglig to teach him to feed himself. He is perfectly capable of spooning food up and putting it in his mouth and he can hold a cup and drink from it perfectly; I have seen him do it countless times! The problem is that it is almost as though he is struggling to concentrate on eating or drinking - he will eat two spoonfuls, have a sip and put everything down...and either wander off or stay seated at the table, doing something else!

He has never shown an interest in feeding himself. When other babies were eager to grab the spoon out of your hand and learn to eat, Alex was completely happy being spoon-fed. He is very good with food though and enjoys big portions; when we spoon-feed him, he will finish everything! Yet when we leave him to it, he gets distracted immideately and hardly eats anything. He starts school next year and is likely to have some support, but I would really worry less if he was capable of feeding himself at lunch times, as it's such an important and basic life skill.

Any advice would be really appreciated, I hope everyone's having a lovely weekend!

Parents

  • Hi, I've got two sons on the Autistic Spectrum who are now 8 and 10.  When they were younger we had a terrible job getting them to focus on eating, especially our older lad who has a more limited diet.  We tried, as much as possible to make sure we all ate meals together and had a strict, no toys, paper, pens etc at the table rule and just had to keep reminding, reminding to get them to eat.  Sorry, that's not helpful but, to encourage you, the boys are both much, much better now ... they still struggle to hold cutlery but they manage way better than they did.  

    GG :-)

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  • Hi, I've got two sons on the Autistic Spectrum who are now 8 and 10.  When they were younger we had a terrible job getting them to focus on eating, especially our older lad who has a more limited diet.  We tried, as much as possible to make sure we all ate meals together and had a strict, no toys, paper, pens etc at the table rule and just had to keep reminding, reminding to get them to eat.  Sorry, that's not helpful but, to encourage you, the boys are both much, much better now ... they still struggle to hold cutlery but they manage way better than they did.  

    GG :-)

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