Why does my daughter hold food in her mouth?

Hello! I have a 3 (almost 4) year old daughter and for about 2-3 months now she has been pocketing food in her mouth. She will keep it in her mouth for SO LONG if we don’t check it when she is done eating. She had a lip and tongue tie clipped in August and is in speech and occupational therapy (both soft of from having the lip and tongue tie). I have mentioned it to her occupational therapist since it’s a frequent thing and I don’t think that is is really being addressed too much. I wouldn’t be too worried about it if she wasn’t running around, playing, and/or falling asleep with food in her mouth. I’ve read that most the time pocketing food is because of lack of knowing when the mouth is full & I think that is why she does it (when she had her tongue tie she couldn’t move her tongue to the left or right so she didn’t have a way of knowing her mouth was full and now we are doing exercises to help her get that control over her tongue but it doesn’t help with the pocketing food)

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My 2 year old does the same thing. It’s borderline impressive how long she will hold a small piece of steak in her mouth for :joy:

This is a question for the speech therapist. And if she’s not seeing them weekly, she should be

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I used to do this as a kid. For me, it was often because I was being forced to eat food I couldn’t swallow easily (like steak fat). I couldn’t have been any older than 4 and still vividly remember the traumatic way my parents handled it.

My niece would do this. She eventually grew out of it. We called her chipmunk because she would pack those cheeks.