Our Play-Based Approach
At Focused Foundations, we believe mealtime should be about family connection. Eating is a complex task. When a child struggles to eat, there is always an underlying "why." Occupational therapists look at the whole child to find the root cause of their feeding challenges, helping them build real confidence at a pace that feels safe.
Through structured, therapeutic play, we take the fear out of new foods. We guide your child through the natural steps of food interaction, celebrating every milestone along the way.
We proudly utilize the world-renowned Sequential Oral Sensory (SOS) Approach to Feeding. This evidence-based program integrates sensory, motor, and nutritional steps to help children gently move from simply tolerating a new food in the room, to touching it, smelling it, tasting it, and eventually eating it.
Collaborative Care: Dietitian Consultations
Feeding therapy works best when we look at the whole child. To give your family complete peace of mind, we partner with a Registered Dietitian Consultant to provide an extra layer of expert nutritional care alongside your occupational therapy sessions.
Our Dietitian Consultant looks closely at what your child is absorbing nutritionally as a complimentary part of your feeding intake and provides guidance on how to ensure your child is getting their recommended nourishment, wherever they're at in their feeding journey.
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Comprehensive Intake Review: A thorough review of your child's current food repertoire, eating habits, and mealtime history.
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Nutritional Baseline Assessment: An analysis of your child's current vitamin, mineral, and caloric intake to ensure they are safely meeting their developmental guidelines.
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Targeted Areas to Improve: Pinpointing specific nutritional gaps and identifying gentle, high-impact areas where we can optimize their daily diet.
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Practical Home Recommendations: Actionable, stress-free strategies and food-enrichment ideas you can easily implement at your family dinner table.
By combining OT with professional nutritional oversight, we ensure your child stays well-nourished and healthy today, while we work on expanding their food repertoire for the future.
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A highly restricted diet (consistently eating fewer than 20 unique foods).
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Completely eliminating entire food groups (e.g., refusing all meats, fruits, or vegetables).
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Extreme distress, crying, arching, or attempts to escape the table when food is presented.
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Mealtimes consistently feel like a battleground for the entire family.
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Frequent coughing, choking, gagging, or sputtering during meals.
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Difficulty transitioning from purées to table foods or bottle to cup.
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Ongoing weight loss, poor weight gain, or growth plateaus
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Avoiding all foods of a certain texture
Feeding Red Flags: When to seek help
Areas of Specialty
Infant
Feeding
Supporting our littlest clients with bottle feeding, pre- and post-TOTs release, introducing solids, transitioning to purées, and building early oral motor skills.
SOS Approach to Feeding
SOS is an evidence-based program designed to help children with severe feeding difficulties and picky eating through playful, pressure-free interaction. It focuses on six sensory stages of eating: tolerating, interacting, smelling, touching, tasting, and swallowing new foods.
Pediatric
Feeding
Helping toddlers and school-aged children overcome complex feeding challenges, expand their food repertoires, and build lifelong positive relationships with food.
How we help:
Oral Motor Skills
Postural Stability
Sensory Processing
Environmental Strategies
Building the jaw strength, tongue coordination, and lip closure needed to safely chew, manage mixed textures, and swallow without pocketing or losing food.
Evaluating and optimizing your child’s physical alignment and core stability in their highchair or seat, creating the structural foundation required for safe, efficient swallowing.
Helping nervous systems gradually tolerate the varied sights, smells, temperatures, and textures of new or non-preferred foods.
Crafting predictable, low-stress mealtime routines and environmental adjustments that eliminate power struggles and reduce mealtime anxiety.