Welcome to Monday Mornings with Dr. Mona where each week I answer your questions.

To leave a message call 954-526-2641 and I may pick your question for a future episode.

Let's get to our first caller.

Hi Dr. Mona I was wondering if you could ever talk about food therapy and trying to figure out

if your kid is just a picky eater or has a texture problem or if it's something more serious

like a tongue tie or if it has something to do with gag reflexes because right now we're trying

to figure out with our kid what's going on and they don't think he has a tongue tie but he

doesn't want to eat and he gags a lot with textures so I don't know if it's just a texture problem

or a tongue issue. Thank you. This is a great question and I think it's a really important one

to differentiate. To me picky eating involves so many components but can be under two major categories.

Is it more of a behavioral boundary situation or is it more of a mechanical texture sensory

situation? So one is developmental and one is behavioral. This is a huge difference. In behavioral

this has to do with preferences. We all have preferences and to combat this we introduce

safe foods with every meal. We reduce pressure at meal times. We have a routine, a schedule.

We stop rewarding eating so we don't label foods as good or bad. You eat your broccoli,

you get dessert, you just present the food all together and the child decides if they eat,

you know the mantra is you decide when and what and they decide if and how much. So that has to do

with more of the behavioral component but I'll do more about picky eating in the future. The other

is development and this is huge and very important so we have behavior and development that

they're both interchangeable but in development I oftentimes have parents who come in who have been

doing all the behavioral adjustments right they are doing all the routine and offering safe foods

and nothing is really changing. So it's important that we also evaluate the developmental aspect,

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