Oral Motor Delay Treatment in Delhi

Oral motor therapy in Delhi works on the muscles and coordination used for eating, drinking and speaking. The short answer is both our Delhi centres, Vasant Kunj and Malviya Nagar, and which one is a question of your journey rather than of the service. If your child coughs, gags or distresses when eating, that is worth an appointment promptly rather than eventually.

Which of our Delhi centres you would use

We have two centres in Delhi, and which one you use is a question of geography rather than service, because the same pathway runs at both.

eMbrace Vasant Kunj, at C-7, Sector C, Pocket 5, Grand Vasant Kunj, is the larger team and serves south-west Delhi: Vasant Vihar, Munirka, R.K. Puram, Safdarjung Enclave, Anand Niketan, Shanti Niketan, Moti Bagh and Chanakyapuri.

eMbrace at Rainbow, Malviya Nagar, at FC-29, Plot No. 5, Geetanjali, beside Malviya Nagar Metro Station Gate No. 1, serves the Yellow Line corridor through Saket, Hauz Khas and Green Park, and the drive-in catchment of Greater Kailash and Defence Colony. It runs inside Rainbow Children's Hospital, so multidisciplinary therapy sits in the same building as assessment.

If you are in north or west Delhi, either centre is a real journey, and we would usually suggest starting online and coming in only for the parts that have to happen in a room.

Weekly to start, often reducing quickly once a home routine is established. Feeding work is unusual in that progress is measured at your own table rather than in our room, and mealtimes happen several times a day, which is where the repetition comes from.

For parking, the nearest drop-off point and the quickest route at your particular time of day, ask on the intake call. Traffic and parking around every one of these centres change enough through the day that current directions from someone who works there beat anything we could fix on a web page.

When oral motor therapy helps

This sits between speech and feeding, because the same muscles do both. It is worth an assessment when eating, drinking or speech sounds are affected by how the mouth is working rather than by what a child understands or intends.

• Coughing, gagging or distress during meals, which warrants prompt attention at any age
• A very narrow range of accepted foods or textures, beyond ordinary fussiness
• Drooling well past the usual age, or an open mouth posture
• Speech sounds that are unclear because of tongue, lip or jaw movement rather than language
• Feeding difficulty after cleft repair, or with cerebral palsy or low tone

The clinical detail sits on our oral motor therapy page.

What the first appointment involves

An assessment of the structures and their movement, and wherever possible watching your child actually eat or drink, because that shows things a clinic task will not. We take a feeding history and check what has already been tried. You leave with a plan aimed at mealtimes, not at exercises for their own sake.

What we see most of

At Malviya Nagar the commonest referrals are restricted food ranges in toddlers, feeding difficulty in children with cerebral palsy or low tone, and support after cleft lip and palate repair. Because it runs inside Rainbow, a child needing paediatric input as well is not sent to a second address.

Who you would see

Dr Supriya Malik, Founder and CEO, and Head of the Child Development Centre at Rainbow

PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Birmingham, where she was also a postdoctoral researcher, and a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society in the UK. She designed the assessment and therapy pathways every eMbrace centre runs.

Across our Delhi centres, the clinicians who take this work are:

Upasna, Speech Language Pathologist

Upasna holds a Master and a Bachelor in Speech Language Pathology from the Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for Speech and Hearing Disability in Kolkata. Her paediatric work covers spoken language disorders, misarticulation, late language emergence, developmental verbal dyspraxia, developmental stuttering and cluttering, cleft lip and palate, cochlear implant support, cerebral palsy and pragmatic language difficulty in autism.

Which of them you see is decided on the intake call rather than by whoever has the next free slot, and you are told who it will be before you book. Fuller biographies are on our about page.

Schools and services we already work with

Feeding and oral motor work around Delhi usually runs alongside other services, and these are the settings involved.

Our Malviya Nagar centre runs inside Rainbow Children's Hospital, New Delhi, which is why occupational therapy, physiotherapy, speech therapy, behaviour therapy and special education sit in the same building as assessment.

Fees and how long it runs

Fees are quoted upfront on your intake call. Blocks are usually shorter than for other therapies, because once a home routine is working the frequency drops quickly.

Feeding work tied to a structural or neurological cause runs longer, and we say which of those you are looking at rather than letting you assume the shorter one.

Frequently asked questions