We’ve had some students engage in food stealing, as well as putting non-edible things in their mouths and ingesting. Without a diagnosis of PICA, we treat this as behavioral and look at the function and replacement behaviours.

Here are some tips we’ve used to target “food stealing” in our students:

Collect data to see a trend and figure out the function.

Teach FCT that is appropriate for the function. For one student, we taught him to ask for food and then tolerate when the answer was “no” (Hanley tolerance and delay).

There is often a component that is automatically reinforcing, especially if your student is ingesting non-edible items. For that, we also used a DRO procedure.