Chewing, Blowing and Tongue Exercises Won’t Fix Your Child’s Speech — But They Do help with Eating

Many parents are surprised to hear this, but chewing, blowing and tongue exercises are not designed to improve speech.

Activities like chewing practice, blowing bubbles, blowing whistles, or doing tongue “workouts” are often believed to strengthen the mouth for speech. While these exercises may look like they should help, evidence based research in speech-language therapy shows that they do not improve speech sound development.

However, that doesn’t mean these activities are useless. They can be helpful for eating and swallowing skills.

Understanding the difference can help parents make better decisions about the type of therapy their child may need.

Chewing Is an Eating Skill

Chewing is part of a group of abilities called oral motor feeding skills. These are the movements children use to manage food safely in their mouths.

When a child eats, several things have to happen smoothly:

• They need to bite food

• Move the food to the back teeth

• Chew it into smaller pieces

• Mix it with saliva

• Form it into a small ball of food (called a bolus)

• Then swallow safely

For some children, this process is difficult.

They may:

- Struggle to chew tougher foods

- Mash food with their tongue instead of chewing

- Keep food in the front of the mouth

- Avoid certain textures

- Take a very long time to eat

In these cases, chewing exercises can help children learn how to move food around their mouth and break it down more effectively, making eating safer and more efficient.

Why Blowing Exercises Are Sometimes Used

Blowing activities — like blowing bubbles, whistles, horns, or cotton balls — can help children learn to control their breath and coordinate airflow.

These activities can sometimes be useful for:

- Breath control

- Strengthening the muscles used for blowing

- Supporting certain feeding or swallowing tasks

- Teaching children how to coordinate breathing and mouth movements

For example, children who drool a lot or who struggle with certain oral motor control tasks during feeding may benefit from these types of activities.

But again, these skills are not the same as speech.

Why Tongue Exercises Don’t Improve Speech

Parents are often shown tongue exercises such as:

- Sticking the tongue out and pulling it back in

- Moving the tongue from side to side

- Lifting the tongue up to the nose

- Pushing the tongue against a spoon or depressor

These exercises may appear to strengthen the tongue, but speech does not require a strong tongue — it requires a precisely coordinated one.

Speech movements are incredibly fast and finely controlled. When children speak, the tongue makes tiny, rapid movements that change constantly from sound to sound.

Tongue exercises, on the other hand, involve slow, exaggerated movements that are very different from what happens during real speech.

Because of this difference, practicing tongue movements in isolation does not teach the brain how to produce speech sounds more accurately.

Why Chewing, Blowing and Tongue Exercises Don’t Improve Speech

Speech and eating use the same body parts: the tongue, lips, jaw, and cheeks, but they use them in very different ways.

Chewing movements are:

- Slow

- Strong

- Repetitive

Blowing movements are:

- Sustained

- Airflow-focused

Tongue exercises are:

- Isolated

- Exaggerated

Speech movements are:

- Extremely fast

- Highly precise

- Constantly changing

When children speak, the muscles of the mouth make tiny, rapid adjustments many times per second. Practicing chewing, blowing or isolated tongue movements does not train the brain for these precise speech movement.

Research has consistently shown that non-speech oral motor exercises do not improve speech clarity.

What Actually Helps Children Speak More Clearly

If a child is having difficulty producing speech sounds, the most effective therapy focuses on speech itself.

Speech therapy may involve:

- Learning how specific sounds are made

- Listening to and identifying sounds

- Practicing sounds in words and sentences

- Using speech in real conversation

These activities directly train the brain and mouth to produce clearer speech.

The Important Takeaway for Parents

Chewing, blowing and tongue exercises can be very useful — but for feeding skills, not speech.

They may be recommended if a child has difficulty with:

- Chewing food

- Managing food textures

- Moving food around the mouth

- Swallowing safely

- Coordinating breathing during feeding

But if the concern is speech clarity, children need therapy that focuses on speech sounds and communication.

When we match the right therapy to the right difficulty, children make much faster progress.

If you are unsure whether your child’s difficulty is related to feeding, swallowing, or speech, a speech therapist can assess these areas and guide you toward the most appropriate support.

Helping children eat well and speak clearly sometimes involves different skills — and understanding that difference is the first step toward helping them succeed.

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