Adolescent Medicine
Specialized care for teens and young adults facing medical, nutritional, behavioral, and other challenges.
Compassionate care for weight management and feeding difficulty
Our pediatric specialists address nutrition and feeding challenges with a compassionate, family-centered approach. Whether your child needs help with eating, transitioning to solid foods, or gaining or losing weight, our team can help them make lifestyle changes that result in healthier and more manageable mealtimes.
Weight Management Program
Our Health Optimization team provides services for both ends of the weight spectrum, including children who need help gaining or maintaining weight and those who struggle with excess body weight.
The Health Optimization team works with both children who need help gaining or maintaining weight and those who struggle with excess body weight. We collaborate with families to create supportive environments and develop healthy habits for children. We work with you, your child, and their care team to achieve personalized, family-centered goals. This may include nutrition and exercise, medication, and additional evaluations.
Initial evaluation
Personalized treatment plan
Follow-up
Additional childhood obesity resources
Contact Health Optimization Services
You may need a referral from your child’s pediatrician.
Nutrition therapy
Our teams of speech language pathologists, registered dietitians, and occupational therapists treat a wide variety of conditions that prevent children from eating, drinking, or swallowing normally. This includes helping children with physical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy or a cleft palate, learn to eat. We also assist with difficult transitions such as the adjustment from bottle to cup, or baby food to table food.
Intensive feeding programs
These programs help kids from 12 months to elementary school age overcome significant feeding or eating difficulties, such as refusing all or most foods, food tolerance or texture issues, recurrent vomiting, restricted eating patterns, food allergies, and feeding tube dependency.
Our team is dedicated to making mealtimes successful, manageable, and enjoyable for you and your child. The goals of therapy depend on your child’s situation and can include reducing your child’s reliance on a feeding tube, increasing the amount or variety of food they will eat, reducing behavioral disruptions at mealtime, and improving their oral-motor and feeding skills.
Depending on your child’s needs, they may participate in one of the following programs:
Day treatment program
Your child receives three therapeutic feeding sessions per day, every weekday, with our team. Treatment strategies are tailored to their specific needs and your family goals. The program runs weekdays from 8 am to 5 pm, with most children requiring six to eight weeks to complete the full treatment course.
Our kid-friendly facility was designed with children in mind. It includes a play area, family lounge, and individual rooms for children who need a space to nap.
Outpatient feeding therapy
Your child will receive feeding therapy from one of our speech language pathologists or occupational therapists. Each session lasts about an hour and is typically scheduled twice a week over a 10 to 12 week period.
In addition to the twice per week therapy sessions, caregivers are given instructions to continue feeding therapy at home. This option is often for children preparing to start day treatment or transitioning to more complex food textures after completing day treatment.
Contact the Pediatric Intensive Feeding Clinic
You may need a referral from your child’s pediatrician.
Related services
Find a specialist
You may need a referral from your child’s pediatrician.