How we use Motivational Interviewing in our feeding therapy practice

Ever worked with a kiddo who was making excellent progress in the clinic, but zero progress at home? Yeah, us too. Thankfully less and less these days, thanks to one of our favorite therapy tools…Motivational Interviewing!

There are a lot of reasons why we love Motivational Interviewing (MI) and we’ve got a whole post on that here! We want to focus in this post on examples of how we use MI in our pediatric feeding therapy practice to help get on the same page with a parent and to help parents make necessary changes that support their child. Before we jump into the detail of how we use MI in our feeding therapy practice, let’s re-visit the case of our friend Max, who we introduced in our last post about MI.

Max and his family were struggling with picky eating and mealtime battles. They were majorly stressed and overwhelmed. Max was 3 years old, was not gaining weight well, and was developmentally a little delayed. Aside from this, however, all of the GI and ENT work up came negative, yet Max was not eating enough and was severely picky.