Peer-reviewed article
Navigating through trauma-informed care and behavioral treatment in young children with feeding problems.
Patel MR, Andersen-Weber AS ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This paper examines how trauma-informed care principles can be integrated with behavioral treatment for young children with feeding problems. Children may experience psychological trauma from medical procedures, illness, or injury, which can affect their ability to eat. The authors propose a framework combining four key trauma-informed care principles—acknowledging trauma, ensuring safety and trust, promoting choice, and building skills—with evidence-based behavioral interventions for feeding treatment.
Key points
- Pediatric medical traumatic stress can result from exposure to medical procedures, illness, or injury perceived as distressing or threatening
- Trauma-informed care practices have been used in healthcare for over 25 years but are only recently integrated into behavior-analytic practice
- Four tenets of trauma-informed care are proposed: acknowledge trauma and its impact, ensure safety and trust, promote choice and shared governance, and emphasize skill building
- The framework integrates trauma-informed care and evidence-based interventions in tandem for behavioral feeding treatment
- Few studies have previously addressed the application of trauma-informed care to pediatric feeding problems
Limitations
This paper presents a conceptual framework and does not report empirical evaluation of its effectiveness. No data on outcomes, study populations, or comparative results are provided.
Abstract
Children may experience pediatric medical traumatic stress as a consequence of exposure to medical procedures, illness, or injury that are perceived as distressing, threatening, or otherwise aversive. In order to address the traumatic stress, trauma-informed care practices are warranted. The application of trauma-informed care practices has been widely used in healthcare for over 25 years; however, its integration into behavior-analytic practice has emerged more recently. Although trauma-informed care principles have informed practice across multiple areas of behavior analysis, relatively few studies have addressed their application to the treatment of pediatric feeding problems. Rajaraman et al. proposed four tenets of trauma-informed care that complement behavior-analytic practice as a whole: (1) acknowledge trauma and its potential impact, (2) ensure safety and trust, (3) promote choice and shared governance, and (4) emphasize skill building. In this paper, we describe a novel framework of the application of these tenets into behavioral feeding treatment. Specifically, we examine a balanced progression in which trauma-informed care and evidence-based interventions are integrated and implemented in tandem.