Did you learn about newborn oral reflexes and motor reflexes in school? If you did, did you fully grasp how they can affect feeding skills?
Primitive reflexes include: rooting, tongue protrusion, transverse tongue, phasic bite, sucking, gag, moro, grasp, tonic neck, and stepping.
How important are these reflexes to feeding? Infantly!
The rooting and sucking reflex, for example, are critical during the beginning of a baby’s life so that s/he is able to feed and take in enough to not only sustain life but to grow and thrive.
The rooting reflex is where the baby’s head will turn in the direction that the cheek is stimulated. This innate reflex aids the baby in finding his mother’s nipple or nipple on the bottle. When babies’ rooting reflex kicks in and they turn towards the nipple, they open their mouth wide and accept the breast or bottle.
Once they have accepted the breast or the bottle and the palate is stimulated, the sucking reflex kicks in, allowing them to feed and take in milk.
What happens when primitive reflexes are retained?
When any of these primitive reflexes are retained, it can lead to difficulty sucking, swallowing, latching, transitioning to solid foods, and even lead to picky eating.
If you’d like to learn more about reflexes, how to assess reflexes in your feeding evaluation, and what the appropriate referrals are depending on your findings, you’re not going to want to miss the opportunity to be in the next Feed The Peds® cohort.
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