Food selectivity: individualized behavioral assessment and intervention

Explore food selectivity through the child’s communication, feeding needs, learning history, and everyday routines. This bilingual course helps behavior analysts develop individualized assessment questions and select supports that promote meaningful participation, well-being, and autonomy.

Give children accessible ways to express hunger, choose a food, request help or more, say no, and ask for a break. Examine how communication barriers may affect mealtime interactions while considering pain, feeding skills, preferences, and environmental conditions. Refusal and distress call for careful assessment rather than an assumed cause.

Work through fictional cases, sample data, and research discussions to plan teaching with choice and assent, coach caregivers, and monitor separate outcomes in communication, participation, and consumption. Learn when medical, nutritional, feeding, or swallowing questions require coordination with appropriately qualified professionals.

Designed for professionals with prior behavior-analytic training, this course develops clinical reasoning and support selection. It does not establish specialized feeding competence or replace medical, nutritional, swallowing, or mental-health assessment. Clinical implementation requires appropriate competence, individualized evaluation, consent, and interdisciplinary coordination when indicated.

• Distinguish food selectivity, communication barriers, and concerns that require interdisciplinary evaluation.
• Describe foods, routines, preferences, needs, and communication opportunities without assuming the cause of behavior.
• Measure communication, participation, consumption, and implementation as distinct outcomes.
• Select accessible communication supports for hunger, preferences, help, refusal, and breaks.
• Use functional hypotheses and a critical reading of evidence to plan individualized teaching with choice and assent.
• Coach caregivers, review response to intervention, support generalization, and document clinical decisions and follow-up.