Oral Motor Delays

If your child is having trouble controlling her mouth muscles to talk and eat, and doesn’t seem able to master chewing, blowing, or making specific sounds, she may have an oral motor disorder. While these are physical issues, they can have a neurological component.

Oral motor disorders can fall into three main areas:

• Oral or verbal apraxia – the inability to get the mouth to do what the brain tells it to do due to motor planning difficulties

• Delay in the development of the musculature for eating

• Dysarthria – the inability to eat safely or speak clearly due to muscle weakness or sluggishness

Oral motor disorders can be caused by incorrect motor programming of the muscles of the mouth – the brain sends a message to the mouth muscles, but the muscles either don’t receive or misinterpret the message. Then the muscles don’t move or move in the wrong way, making it difficult to manage food in the mouth and to produce intelligible speech. Some children have difficulties remembering the movements so that they can become automatic.

Low muscle tone of the lips, tongue, or jaw can be another cause. Children with low muscle tone in the jaw often have their mouth open. Children with weak lips have trouble puckering up to drink from a straw, and often lose control of liquids while trying to drink. A weak tongue makes it hard to push food around the mouth while eating. Drooling also can be a problem associated with low muscle tone.

Weak muscles can affect a child’s gag reflex or cause a child to choke, which makes eating unpleasant, creating a feeding disorder. So strengthening the muscles and resetting the neural pathways is essential in treating oral motor and feeding disorders.