Road to a Pizza Party

Photos courtesy of Ozarks Healthcare

How a 7-year-old boy overcame sensory challenges to celebrate a milestone in his battle with food aversion

In most households, there’s nothing particularly unusual about a 7-year-old boy enjoying a pizza party with his classmates. After all, pizza is practically its own food group, especially for elementary students.

But for Brady French, the party he shared recently with his schoolmates represented a major milestone. 

“It had been a long road to get to that point,” said his mother, Santana. “We’ll put it that way.”

Born on the autism spectrum, Brady developed difficulty with food at a young age. As a baby, he ate everything his mother put in front of him until one day, he didn’t. 

“When he was a baby, it was no issue whatsoever,” Santana said. “But one day, it was like a switch flipped and he was terrified of any kind of eating utensil.”

Having had no experience with children on the autism spectrum to that point, Santana and her husband, Jeremy, sought help from the speech and occupational therapists at Ozarks Healthcare. So began the long and slow process of helping the boy develop ways to cope at mealtime. 

“I remember the day vividly when his therapist started with an unopened pudding cup,” Santana said. “This child tensed up, hit the pudding cup to where it flew up against the wall and he just rocked back and forth. She couldn’t get anything else out of him the rest of the session that day.”

Over time Ozarks’ professional, compassionate staff — combined with the efforts of a loving, patient family — began to see progress. 

“His speech teacher started trying to string different things together,” Santana said. “He likes vanilla wafer cookies. To get some sort of smooth texture in, we eventually introduced another pudding cup and started dipping the vanilla wafer cookie in the pudding just to start trying to string different things together to get him to branch out a little bit more. 

“At home, it’s just hit and miss. We have to keep pushing the different foods, keep setting them out so he can get used to them and see that it’s OK.”

So far, Brady has become comfortable enough with chicken nuggets, fish sticks and chocolate milk, as well as the aforementioned cookies as efforts continue to broaden his palate by desensitizing him to new foods. 

“His therapists are amazing,” Santana said. “It takes a long time, and they have so much patience. We start with having him smell it and talking to him about the smell. Eventually, you take something like a cookie and you tap it to his cheeks, get him to tap it to his lips. There’s been an occasion or two where he’s stressed out so much that we had to start tapping at the knees and work our way up just to get him desensitized to it.”

Which brings us back to the pizza experiment, where everything that most kids love about the dish — the crunchy crust, the gooey cheese, the savory sauce — proved initially to be sensory overload for Brady.

“His therapist took a Rice Krispie treat, that also has a lot of different textures and flavors to it, rolled it up, squished it into a ball and eventually he started popping that into his mouth,” Santana said. “One day she said to me, ‘OK, Friday we’re going to get a piece of pizza, and we’re going to try to do the same type of thing with pizza.’ Sure enough, just tearing it apart, rolling it and squishing it up, he finally popped it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. That same day, we went out and got pizza and brought him home to keep pushing it here at home. Now, every Friday is pizza night. Just this year, he has finally started eating his lunch in the cafeteria with the kids at school.”

Given the long road Brady has walked to get there, the Halloween pizza feast he shared with classmates — headlined by his favorite: Domino’s, plain cheese — was an opportunity to celebrate in more ways than one. For Santana, it also was a cause for hope for the future. 

“Brady is brilliant, and he loves school,” Santana said. “The child has been reading since he was 2. At school the other day, the counselor came to me when I was picking him up and said, ‘I just have to tell you, from the first time he started school ’til now, I can actually hold a conversation with him.’ Before, he wouldn’t look people in the eye. He may or may not respond to you. Now, if an adult says something to him just in passing in the hallway or something, he does actually communicate back and forth. 

“He gets interested in something, and that’s what he puts his whole heart into. The future is very bright for him, and it will be interesting to see just what he can do and what he will do. My dream for him is to be able to do and accomplish whatever he puts his mind to.”