My child has developed a fear of choking

[Nodwas132]

Hi thanks in advance.... so 6 weeks ago my daughter (5) got a bit of crisp stuck in her throat ever since she has developed a fear of choking and it has got to the point where she is losing weight we have tried everything...

She is chewing food for so long she isn't getting time to eat at meal times especially at school.... we took her to the doctors last week and it was a waste of time. We hoped the doctor would reassure her and she was useless... my wife had to keep prompting her to help... 1 week on it is getting worse she is even chewing mashed potato and swilling it round in her mouth. We are getting really concerned for her as she is very active.

Any ideas? As she is very sensory driven and a very smart little girl so it's hard to convince her to try different things as she gets herself in such a state. Don't want her to latch onto the idea of only being able to eat blended liquids....

???

My DD behaved similarly after being sick a couple of years ago. She was 6, so had the understanding that food is fuel and we need to eat but it was really worrying as she lost weight (21st to 3rd centile). I made sure to get in high calorie foods and protein and tried really hard not to let my anxiety show. I made jam sandwiches with wholemeal bread but cut them into tiny ‘rounds’ with a scone cutter, got high protein yoghurts, all sorts of tricks. The main thing I kept in mind was to stuff the healthy eating “plate” to the back of my brain and concentrate on making food that was tolerable. It took about four months before she’d eat her usual diet (already fairly restrictive due to ASD) but she eventually is back up to 21st centile. Keep casual and calm, make food soft for now if that’s what she’ll tolerate, and mentally tot up the essentials: proteins and fluid intake. Best of luck.

PS: should say paediatrician and GP were kept in the loop and main advice was so long as she gradually increased intake, the main priority was to avoid food aversion so go with whatever it took.

Hi op so I was born with a damaged oesophagus and had an op at 3 to repair it but it has a narrowing down low which will always be there. I'm 35 now and still need to be very careful when eating.

As you can imagine, growing up I got alot of food "stuck" and it's horrible. I was always cautious with eating (still am) but after a particularly unpleasant incident of something being stuck I would be really anxious. I'd go through phases of not eating meat especially. I still don't eat much fruit now.

Things that helped me - eating slowly and with no pressure no pressure. Things being cut up small. Soft foods following "incidents". Always having a drink when eating.

Can you hide protein podwer in what u can get her to eat? We had a child like this at nursery and one thing that helped alot was the parent teaching the child what to do when choking. This allowed the child to have the power to fix it or get help. They taught her the international sign for choking and how to get a grown ups attention to help. They also sent her with choking printouts for every staff remember ( even though we had the posters up). We also read a couple stories to the class about choking or being hurt and how there grown up would always be there to help. We also did blended food for a few days then started making it thicker then chunky then on to regular food. Mabye also check the internet cause I remember a kids video teaching the children how many times to chew each bite

My dd had this after she nearly choked on a lolly and grandparent died. Around aged 5. I would just let her eat quavers which she loved and had no issue with then try and ignore it and keep going. I'd also video her eating the quavers and show her she was fine. Good luck x

My son went through this a few years ago after getting a Covid swab that irritated his throat. He became convinced he would choke on every piece of food and lost a lot of weight. We ended up doing a lot of shakes. I'm a speech and language therapist specialising in dysphagia ( swallowing difficulties) so used a lot of diagrams and honest information about anatomy and how swallowing works and just kept reinforcing that. I tried to avoid the terms choking/ getting stuck as this didn't help as he didn't actually have a swallowing difficulty so being overloaded with 'scary' information would have made it worse, and it gradually got better and now he's fine.