Extreme picky eating and mealtime battles, worked gently at your own table. No force, ever. Medicaid usually $0.
Five accepted foods, and two of them are a specific brand. Dinner as a nightly standoff. Panic at a new texture touching the plate. Budding Futures ABA works on feeding and mealtime goals with Colorado families at their own tables, gradually and without force. Rachel Blackburn, BCBA builds each plan, and Medicaid families usually pay nothing.
Not all feeding problems are behavioral. Swallowing difficulties, reflux, allergies, and oral-motor issues are medical, and they belong with your pediatrician and, when needed, a speech or occupational therapist. We ask about medical workup before writing feeding goals, and we coordinate with the professionals treating that side rather than duplicating them. What ABA therapy owns is the behavioral layer: the fear, the rigidity, the mealtime battles, and the shrinking food list that survives even after medicine says everything is fine.
Force creates fear, and fear shrinks food lists. So we work below the refusal. A new food might start across the table, then on the plate's edge, then touched, then licked, then one bite with a preferred food right behind it. Every step is your child's choice, reinforced honestly, and the next step waits until the current one is calm. Behavior analysts call it gradual exposure with positive reinforcement. Parents call it the first new vegetable in two years.
Mealtime behavior gets its own goals: staying at the table, using utensils, keeping food on the plate instead of airborne. Those run on the same tools we use for any routine, small steps, clear expectations, real reinforcement, and they are practiced at your actual table, with your actual plates, at your actual dinner hour. Progress is measured in data, foods accepted, bites taken, minutes seated, so you can see the list growing instead of guessing.
Your child eats far more meals with you than with any therapist. Parent coaching teaches you the same presentation and reinforcement steps, what to say when a food is refused, and what to stop doing, usually the pleading and the short-order cooking, gently and with a replacement plan. Families tell us the table gets calmer before the food list gets longer, and that order is by design.
Feeding is one of the core areas we teach. See every skill ABA therapy teaches at home.
We believe you, and we never run starve-them-out plans. The whole method exists because pressure fails with exactly these kids. Steps start so small they feel like nothing, and the data shows they add up.
It is ABA therapy applied to feeding and mealtime behavior. If your child needs medical feeding therapy for swallowing or oral-motor work, that is an SLP or OT service, and we will tell you so and coordinate with them.
Feeding and mealtime goals are a standard part of a medically necessary ABA plan. Health First Colorado usually covers therapy at $0, and Colorado requires state-regulated plans to cover ABA. We verify your exact benefits first.
She writes and reviews every treatment plan, and supervises the therapists who work in your home.
Read Rachel's profileHe founded Budding Futures and runs the day to day, from a family's first phone call onward.
Read Mark's profileTell us what mealtimes look like and what the current food list is. We will explain what a feeding plan would start with.