Tongue thrust

[MummytoMog]

Dd, 3.4 and speech delayed, was having a bedtime bottle until nearly three when we cut it out on the recommendation of SALT. Since then she has refused milk, but drinks squash from a hard spout, no spill sippy cup. I noticed yesterday that she is still shoving her tongue out into normal cups when trying to drink. She did this when she was teeny, but I haven't tried her with a normal cup for ages. DS can drink normally, if messily, and he's only 21 months. She can use a straw, although she doesn't like to. Anyway, I was watching her closely while she was talking and she shoves her tongue forward for words that really don't need it. Like ice cream and elephant. Mr Google tells me that this is called tongue thrust, is it something I can work on at home? Should I mention it to SALT? We don't see them again for ages. I've dug out her straw cup and hidden her sippy cup to see if that helps.

Thought I'd revive this quickly to say that the straw cup worked wonders. DD drank normally, without the pokey tongue, from a cup yesterday for the first time ever. We ended up using a nice cup with a straw that folds away. The straw itself is soft and she seemed to prefer that to the hard straw cups (and she couldn't demolish it by chewing on it). I think her speech is a bit clearer, but it's hard to tell. She's certainly saying 'sorry' better...

Ds still thrusts his tongue out most of the time, one of the things that helped with drinking was this honey bear bottle recommended by ds's SALT.

Yes, that's very similar to DD's cup. We don't need to squeeze it to get her to suck, she does know how to do it, she just preferred not to. We made a big deal out of it being her special pink kitty cup and she just seemed to take to it, and lo and behold, no tongue thrust :) Glad I tried it, as we haven't seen SALT for a couple of months and won't see them for another month.

If only it was all that easy to fix