Feeding Therapists – Adelaide and Beyond
‘Lively Eaters’ is a private practice of allied health Feeding Therapists with professional training in Dietetics, Occupational Therapy, Speech Pathology, Paediatrics and Mental Health. We support children and their families who are experiencing mealtime, tube feeding, eating and/or drinking difficulties from birth through the early school and teenage years. We have 2 family focused Centres in Adelaide and the Adelaide Hills and for over 12 years have worked with children Australia wide and Internationally.
What Do We Do?
Underlying our practice is the philosophy that feeding an infant/child is one of a parent’s most important jobs and a central component of the parent-infant/child relationship. Feeding/eating is so much more than ‘putting food in the mouth, chewing and swallowing’ and there are many physical, medical and emotional aspects to consider.
Children are highly sensitive to their environment and the development of a successful “feeding partnership” can be adversely affected by many different factors in the child and/or parents. The Lively Eaters team provides multi-disciplinary team assessment and therapy services for a wide range of infant, children and adolescent feeding difficulties. We strive to bring together all of the components which we know to impact successful and functional eating – relational, emotional, sensory, motor, behavioural and medical – and work together with families to better understand the impact of these within their family unit and how to move ‘forward’.
Our Lively Eaters Feeding Therapists can support you at ‘our place’, ‘your place’ (if clinically indicated), via tele-therapy or at The Memorial Hospital (for our inpatient tube weaning program). We strive to provide the level of support your family requires in the setting that will best achieve your child’s feeding therapy goals.
We create a team for each child that meets your family’s needs rather than assimilating you into a pre-determined therapy program. As we are a team, you benefit from being able to work with a range of Feeding Therapists all in one place – whether by training they be a Dietitian, Occupational Therapist, Speech Pathologist or Mental Health Specialist, you have access to our wealth of knowledge all within ‘our place’.
