If your child eats a shrinking list of foods, gags at unfamiliar textures, or turns every meal into a standoff, you have probably already been told to just keep offering it. When that has not worked, feeding therapy is the next step.
Feeding therapy is not about getting your child to eat. It is about lowering the fear first, building familiarity, and letting curiosity do the work — so eating becomes something your child can manage rather than something the whole family has to survive.
- ✓ Delivered by an Accredited Practising Dietitian and SOS-trained Feeding Therapist
- ✓ Hands-on sessions with ovens on site — children bake, handle and explore real food
- ✓ Nutrition and growth monitored throughout, not just feeding behaviour
- ✓ Blackburn, Epping and Lilydale — Medicare, NDIS and private health pathways
What feeding therapy is
Feeding therapy is a structured, graded approach to helping a child become comfortable with food. It works on the understanding that eating is not one skill but a sequence of them, and that a child who is frightened of a food cannot simply be persuaded past that fear.
Rather than starting at the plate, therapy starts much further back — at whatever point the child can genuinely tolerate. Progress is measured in steps along that sequence, not in mouthfuls.
The sequence we work through
- Tolerating — being in the room with the food, at the same table, without distress
- Looking — noticing it, describing it, with no expectation of going further
- Touching — with a fork, then a fingertip, then hands
- Smelling — bringing it closer on their own terms
- Tasting — a lick, a touch to the lip, a nibble
- Eating — only once the earlier steps feel safe
A child might spend several sessions at touching, and that is a genuine result. In feeding therapy, most of the progress happens well before food reaches the mouth.
How common are feeding difficulties in Australian children?
Feeding worries are very common. The Victorian Government’s Better Health Channel notes that up to half of all toddlers can be described as fussy eaters, and that food is a frequent source of stress for Australian parents.
For most children that fussiness eases with time and supportive strategies at home. For a smaller group it does not. The range of accepted foods keeps narrowing, mealtimes become distressing, and nutritional intake starts to suffer. That is the point at which structured feeding therapy is worth considering.
Working out which group your child sits in is difficult from the inside, which is why an assessment is often more useful than more waiting.
Who feeding therapy is for
Feeding therapy may help if your child:
- Eats fewer than about twenty foods, and the list is getting shorter
- Refuses entire food groups — no vegetables, no meat, or no fruit at all
- Gags, retches or becomes distressed at unfamiliar textures
- Will only accept particular brands, packaging, colours or temperatures
- Becomes anxious when a new food appears on the plate
- Will not eat at childcare, school, restaurants or other people’s homes
- Has dropped foods after an illness, a choking episode or a hospital stay
- Is autistic or has ADHD and eats a very restricted range
- Has moved beyond typical fussiness — it has been months rather than weeks, and it is not improving
You do not need a diagnosis to start. Many families come to us with no formal label at all — just a child who has stopped eating enough variety, and a household that has started to dread dinner.
What feeding therapy can and cannot do
Feeding therapy can widen the range of foods a child will accept, reduce distress at mealtimes, and give families a way of eating together that does not end in conflict. Alongside it, your dietitian works to protect nutritional intake while the slower work of building confidence happens.
What it is not is a fast route to a child who eats everything. Progress is genuinely gradual and it is not linear — children often go backwards during illness, holidays or periods of change. Individual results vary.
It is also not the right service for every feeding difficulty, and we will tell you when that is the case.
When your child needs a different professional
If your child has swallowing difficulties — coughing, choking, wet-sounding breathing during meals, or concerns about aspiration — that requires a speech pathologist, and often a medical review first. We refer, we do not attempt it.
If the difficulty is primarily oral-motor, such as trouble with chewing mechanics or tongue movement, speech pathology or occupational therapy should lead. We are glad to work alongside them on the nutrition side.
If your child is losing weight, or has not grown as expected, tell us when you book. That changes what we prioritise at the first appointment.
What actually happens in a session
Most parents arrive expecting us to put food in front of their child and encourage them to eat. That is not what happens.
A session is structured play with food. Your child is invited to interact with it in whatever way feels manageable, and eating is the last step rather than the first. Sessions typically run 45 minutes, and parents stay in the room — a large part of the work is coaching you, because what happens at your kitchen table across a week will always outweigh what happens in one appointment.
Baking, and why our clinics have ovens
Our Blackburn, Epping and Lilydale therapy rooms have working ovens, and baking is a regular part of what we do. This is unusual for a dietetic practice, and it is deliberate.
Baking gives a child something a plate of food cannot:
- Sustained contact without pressure. Handling flour, cracking eggs and stirring batter means twenty minutes of touch and smell with nobody asking the child to eat anything.
- Control. The child is the one doing it. For a child whose experience of food has been other people deciding what goes near them, that shift matters.
- Transformation. Food changes as it bakes. Something that arrived as an unfamiliar ingredient comes out as a familiar shape, which lowers the barrier considerably.
- Smell exposure that fills the room. Aroma is one of the earliest steps on the sequence, and an oven delivers it continuously and gently, without a single request.
- Ownership at the end. Children tend to treat something they made differently from something they were served.
It is not a cooking class. What we bake, and what your child is asked to do with it, is chosen to sit at the right point on their sequence.
Myths and outdated advice about fussy eating
Some of the most widely repeated advice about children and food is unhelpful, and a little of it makes things worse. These are the ones we spend the most time undoing.
They will grow out of it
Often true — for typical fussiness. It is far less reliable when the list of accepted foods is shrinking rather than expanding, when there is real distress involved, or when growth is affected. Waiting is a reasonable strategy for some children and a costly one for others.
They will eat when they are hungry enough
Hunger does not override sensory fear. For a child whose refusal is driven by texture, smell or anxiety, withholding alternatives tends to increase distress and reduce intake rather than widen variety.
Just one more bite
Pressure at the table reliably increases refusal over time, even when it produces a bite in the moment. The same applies to rewards, bargaining and bribery — they shift the focus away from the food and onto the negotiation.
Hide vegetables in their food
Blending vegetables into a sauce may improve one meal’s nutrition, but it does nothing to help a child accept vegetables, because they never knowingly encounter them. If it is discovered, it can also damage a child’s trust in what is on their plate.
Fussy eating is a discipline problem
For children with sensory, medical or anxiety-driven feeding difficulties it is not about behaviour management, and treating it that way adds conflict without changing the eating.
Feeding difficulties rarely travel alone
By the time families reach us there is often more than one thing going on. Worth mentioning when you book:
- Constipation and tummy discomfort — a common and very treatable driver of reduced appetite and food refusal
- Iron deficiency — both a consequence of a narrow diet and a cause of poor appetite, which makes it self-reinforcing
- Food allergy or intolerance — including cow’s milk protein allergy, where genuine discomfort has taught avoidance
- Coeliac disease — worth excluding where there is poor growth alongside restricted eating
- Autism and ADHD — sensory profiles, and separately the appetite changes associated with some prescribed medications
- Anxiety — particularly after a choking episode, a vomiting illness or a hospital admission
Your dietitian looks at these alongside the feeding work, and liaises with your GP or paediatrician where something needs investigating. Never stop or change a medication your child has been prescribed without speaking to their doctor first.
Our approach
Every family receives a clear, personalised action plan and a defined pathway, so you know what you are working on and what happens next.
- Get in touch. Tell us what is happening at mealtimes. We will let you know whether feeding therapy is the right starting point, or whether your child needs a different service first.
- Initial assessment, 45 to 60 minutes. A full feeding, growth and nutrition assessment, including how mealtimes actually run at home.
- Your action plan. Practical objectives with agreed goals and milestones — where we start on the sequence, what a realistic first step looks like, and how we protect nutrition along the way.
- Your pathway. A defined map of next steps and how ongoing support is structured, including session frequency and what you will be working on at home between visits.
- Review. We check progress together, adjust the pace and change the plan as your child moves. Goals are agreed with you rather than imposed, and we do not set fixed numeric targets.
Your dietitian works alongside your GP, paediatrician and any occupational therapist, speech pathologist or psychologist already involved, so the feeding work fits within your child’s overall care.
Why families choose NutriBlooms
A paediatric team, not one clinician
Feeding therapy is delivered by Monica Ng, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Feeding Therapist with SOS training. She works within a paediatric team that includes Kineta Sulemani, whose background covers responsive feeding, ARFID and home enteral nutrition, and Simon Salerno, who works across paediatric nutrition, ARFID and tube feeding.
Eight Accredited Practising Dietitians across the practice, with in-clinic case conferencing to our Principal Dietitian — so a complex presentation can be discussed by the team rather than carried by one clinician.
Recognised in primary care
NutriBlooms received the Dietitians Australia and Griffith University Quality in Primary Care Award in 2025, from the body that accredits the dietetic profession in Australia.
We also received the Local Business Award — Outstanding Health Improvement Services and the Quality Business Award — Quality Rating Over 95%, both in 2025.
Every dietitian at NutriBlooms is an Accredited Practising Dietitian, and NutriBlooms is a registered NDIS provider.
Funding, fees and referrals
NutriBlooms is not a bulk-billing clinic. Medicare pays a rebate on eligible appointments and a gap fee applies. Contact us for current fees before you book.
Medicare and the GP Chronic Condition Management Plan
From 1 July 2025, the older chronic disease care plans were replaced by a single GP Chronic Condition Management Plan. What that means in practice:
- Your GP refers by ordinary referral letter — the old structured form is gone
- Your GP no longer has to name the provider or specify how many services you use, so the choice of clinician is yours
- Up to five subsidised allied health services per calendar year, or ten for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, shared across all allied health providers rather than five per profession
- The referral remains valid for eighteen months from the first session
- Plans put in place before 1 July 2025 can still be used until 30 June 2027
Other pathways
- Private bookings — no referral required
- NDIS — registered provider supporting self, plan and agency managed participants, with reports available for plan reviews
- Private health extras — on-the-spot claiming where your cover includes dietetics
- DVA and WorkCover — accepted
Where we offer feeding therapy
Hands-on feeding therapy runs at Blackburn, Epping and Lilydale, where our therapy rooms and ovens are. Paediatric dietetic consultations — nutrition support, growth monitoring and parent coaching — are available at all six Melbourne clinics, via home visits within approximately 20 km, and via telehealth Australia-wide. Feeding therapy itself is hands-on and needs to be in person.
Frequently asked questions
Feeding therapy is structured, pressure-free support that helps children become comfortable with food through gradual exposure. Sessions move through looking, touching, smelling and eventually tasting, at the pace the child can manage. It is used for children with very restricted diets, sensory food aversions or high anxiety around eating. The aim is to reduce fear and build confidence, not to increase how much is eaten in any single session.
A standard dietitian appointment looks at what your child eats, whether it meets their nutritional needs, and what strategies you can use at home. Feeding therapy is hands-on work with your child, building tolerance and confidence around food step by step. At NutriBlooms both are available, and many families use them together: a nutrition plan to protect intake, and feeding therapy to widen what your child can manage.
Not always. The SOS approach used in feeding therapy is transdisciplinary and is practised by dietitians, speech pathologists and occupational therapists. Which professional leads depends on what is driving the difficulty. Sensory and behavioural feeding difficulties can be led by a dietitian with feeding therapy training. Swallowing difficulties and oral-motor problems need a speech pathologist, and we will refer you.
It is worth an assessment. A diet of roughly twenty foods or fewer, particularly when the list is shrinking rather than growing, is generally beyond typical fussy eating. It does not automatically mean something is wrong, but it is worth having someone check nutritional adequacy and look at what is driving the restriction.
No. Many families come to us without any formal diagnosis, simply because mealtimes have become difficult. If we think an assessment for ARFID, autism or another condition would help, we will say so and help you work out where to go next.
Yes. Our Blackburn, Epping and Lilydale therapy rooms have ovens, and baking is a regular part of sessions. It gives children sustained, low-pressure contact with food while they stay in control of it, and the smell of something baking builds familiarity without anyone asking them to eat. It is not a cooking class. It is graded exposure with a purpose.
This varies considerably. Some children make meaningful progress within a handful of sessions, while others with longstanding restriction need support over several months. Your dietitian will give you an indication after the initial assessment and review it with you as you go. Every child is different and individual results vary.
NutriBlooms is not a bulk-billing clinic. With a GP Chronic Condition Management Plan you can claim a Medicare rebate, and a gap fee applies. NDIS participants can usually fund feeding therapy through their plan, and private health extras cover may apply with on-the-spot claiming. Contact us for current fees before you book.
Mealtimes can get easier
Talk to us about whether feeding therapy is right for your child. No referral is needed for private bookings, and we offer Medicare, NDIS, DVA, WorkCover and private health pathways.