Development And Preliminary Application Of A Caregiver Directed Questionnaire To Identify Feeding-Swallowing Difficulties In Young Children

The present clinical focus article was designed to explain the development and preliminary application of a questionnaire to query parents/caregivers about the feeding-swallowing difficulties of their children. The overall goal of this questionnaire is to provide a tool for the identification of feeding-swallowing difficulties we found retrospectively to be associated with developmental language disorders (Malas, Trudeau, Chagnon, & McFarland, 2015; Malas et al., 2017), which might eventually aid in early diagnosis and intervention for these disorders. Our working hypotheses were that the questionnaire would provide a useful/feasible method to query for feeding-swallowing difficulties and that specific indicators of feeding-swallowing difficulties would occur more frequently in our all comers and developmental language-disordered samples. The questionnaire contains 30 Likert-type questions querying for indicators of feeding-swallowing difficulties from the four general categories of difficulties in sucking, food transition difficulties, food selectivity, and salivary control issues. We sent it to parents from an all comers population and to parents from a smaller sample of children with developmental language disorders; 97 and 9 questionnaires were analysed from these two samples, respectively. Preliminary results suggest that the questionnaire might be a useful tool in identifying feeding-swallowing difficulties via parent-directed questions in young children and that indicators of the general categories of difficulties in sucking and food selectivity were the most frequently observed in both samples. Ongoing work in our lab is directed at the refinement and further validation of the tool to increase its utility in identifying feeding-swallowing difficulties in children with later occurring developmental language disorders.