Oromotor Skills: What They Are and How to Train Your Baby

Oromotor skills are essential for a baby’s ability to eat, drink, and eventually speak, but what are they, and can you do anything at home to improve them before your baby starts weaning? The simple answer is yes, and it’s easier than you think. 

What Are Oromotor Skills?

These skills involve the movement, coordination and strength of the muscles in the mouth, lips, tongue, jaw, and cheeks. The correct development of oromotor skills is crucial in laying the foundations for effective chewing, handling texture,  safe swallowing, and even speech development.

Why Are Oromotor Skills Important?

Oromotor skills play a vital role in a baby’s early development. They impact:

• Feeding – Proper sucking, chewing, and safe swallowing are necessary for a baby to transition from milk to solid foods

• Speech Development – Strong oral muscles aid in forming sounds and words

• Breath Control – Oromotor coordination helps with controlled breathing, essential for eating and speaking

• Sensory Integration - Oromotor skills are linked to sensory processing, allowing developing babies to explore their environment through the mouth

How to Train Your Baby’s Oromotor Skills

While oromotor development occurs naturally, there are ways to support and enhance these skills through simple exercises, activities and even your choice of weaning accessories. Here’s some things you can do at home to give your baby a head start.

Tummy Time

According to the NHS, you can start tummy time as soon as your baby is born. Tummy time helps build neck and upper body strength, indirectly supporting jaw stability and oral muscle development. Encourage daily tummy time to improve posture and coordination.

The NHS recommends laying baby on your chest initially for a a few minutes at a time, up to 3 times a day. Be sure only to do this during waking hours and when there’s no risk of you falling asleep. From 1-3 months, you can lay them on their tummy on the floor on a soft, not fluffy, rug, with constant supervision. From 4 months upwards, you can introduce toys for them to reach for. Again, constant supervision is vital.

Early Introduction of Teethers

It’s a common misconception that teethers are only for teething, but Occupational Therapists recommend introducing them as early as birth, but certainly from 3-4 months of age. 

Not all teethers are created equal! Our very own Dotty the Dinosaur Multisensory Teether is dentist-approved and recommended by Occupational Therapists for her role in strengthening little mouth muscles in readiness for weaning.

Five unique features promote key exercises that give the mouth a full muscle workout, strengthening the jaw, lips, cheeks and tongue. This helps develop the skills needed to move food around the mouth successfully, process different textures, and nurture safe, independent feeding. You can read more specifics about Dotty and her features here.     

Open-Cup Drinking

Open-cup drinking is another great way to nurture the development of oral motor skills. Again, these skills are fundamental for eating, moving food around the mouth and swallowing. In open-cup drinking, babies and toddlers need to activate different mouth muscles from those used when drinking from the breast or bottle. In the latter, the jaw muscles play a key role in a sucking motion, whereas open-cup drinking requires a more coordinated effort from multiple facial muscles, including the lips, cheeks and tongue.

More precise lip and tongue movements help to control the free-flowing liquid, promoting better overall oromotor development. Drinking from an open cup like the Bibado Sippit is great for developing the swallow mechanism, which is crucial for speech development.

Introduce Textures 

Chewing is not only a practical way to process food and break it down into more easily digestible forms. It can help develop proper swallow patterns and nasal breathing, but it also stimulates neural pathways and can improve concentration and cognitive function. We’ve touched on the importance of chewing with teethers, but food offers a natural way to work the facial muscles.

Ensuring that your little one is exposed to many different textures and consistencies during weaning will improve chewing and tongue movement and make them safer, independent eaters. It will also minimise the risk of picky eating later. The general rule of thumb here is not to delay - introducing as much variety as possible before your little one develops preferences and aversions that typically surface after 10-12 months old. You can read more about the safe introduction of textures and the importance of the texture timeline here.

Blowing Activities

Most babies naturally start blowing raspberries and bubbles between 4 and 6 months old. You can start encouraging them around this age by modelling the behaviour yourself. These activities strengthen lip and breath control, which is essential for speech development.

Mimic and Play with Sounds

In the same vein, you can make exaggerated facial expressions like sticking out your tongue and encouraging your baby to imitate sounds like “ba,” “ma,” and “da”. This can improve muscle coordination and promote early speech skills. 

Spoon-Feeding and Self-Feeding Practice

Letting your baby self-feed with a spoon or their fingers enhances coordination between their lips, tongue, and jaw. This also promotes independence and strengthens their chewing ability.

A multi-function weaning spoon like the Dippit™ is a great first introduction to baby utensils and can really help to drive not just oromotor skills but gross motor skills and coordination, too. The textured ‘dipper’ end has a unique honey-drizzler structure to promote oral sensory and mouth muscle development, with a soft chewable texture to ease aching gums. You can read more about why we developed it here

Supporting your baby’s oromotor development doesn’t have to be complicated or involve unnecessarily expensive accessories. You can incorporate most of your oromotor training into play and mealtimes at home, and with a handful of the right developmental weaning accessories, you’ll be playing a key role in helping them strengthen their mouth muscles to become happy, healthy little eaters.