Nursery World - Sensory Processing, Part 6

Taste and smell’s development in young children, and advice on supporting those with sensory problems. By Anne O’Connor and Dr Kath Dickinson in the final part in this series

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In their book Raising a Sensory Smart Child, Lindsey Biel and Nancy Peske describe taste and smell as ‘The yum and yuck of it all’ – which, in the simplest of terms, describes the defensive and discriminative aspects of these senses from a child’s perspective.

Both taste and smell have been fundamental to our survival since primitive times when something ‘yucky’ was probably bad for us (for example, poisonous, over-ripe, decayed), and if it was ‘yum’ that encouraged us to eat it, because we needed the protein, minerals and vitamins it contained in order to survive.

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