“When our daughter was born with a tongue and lip tie, we were presented with a problem that we didn’t know how to address. Breastfeeding is important to us and we really wanted to give it our best effort. Feeling overwhelmed after having an unsuccessful tongue tie revision, we turned to Lori Overland, MS, CCC-SLP, C/NDT and the TalkTools team in the hopes that some oral motor therapy would help strengthen her tongue and jaw. We started doing oral motor exercises several times a day before breastfeeding and started seeing some improvement pretty quickly. Lori noticed that her tongue still seemed restricted (all long distance via video by the way, which I thought was especially impressive!). We ended up having a more thorough revision of her tongue, and also had her lip tie revised. Within a couple of weeks, we had a baby with a very strong suck and whose symptoms of gagging, choking, and being unable to hold a strong suck while feeding had disappeared. I truly believe that all the oral exercises we did beforehand contributed to the success we saw. Our daughter was five months old at the time and we are so grateful that at almost a year, she’s still breastfeeding.”

Anonymous parent