Second the can’t breath through his nose idea. It was a problem for me when I was young – I didn’t have lots of snot and sneezing but my sinuses would close and I could only breath through my mouth. Ma took me to the Dr. and we tried various decongestants. I outgrew the hay fever when I hit puberty but still to this day have extremely touchy sinuses. Smoke & odors will close me up. The worst thing when that happens is eating. If I don’t have decongestants handy I have to take a deep breath and hold it while I chew. Or chew with my mouth open. It’s a real pain in the ass. Check on this and rule it out.
That definitely would not have worked for me, as I did and still have no preference for eating with other people. If people want to eat with me, great. If they don’t, as long as I get to spend time with them otherwise, I really don’t care.
And, anyways, I’ve never understood how punishments even work on people who are doing something accidentally. I have no idea why a simple reminder would not work just as well. If I feel I’m getting punished for something I didn’t mean to do, I start getting resentful, which makes me less likely to correct the improper action.
small bites. seriously small bites as in baby spoon sized. i could manage to chew and swallow baby bites and not chew with my mouth open or suffocate. A broken nose fixed the sinus issue and i can actually breath with my mouth shut now most of the time. yay my brother for dropping a surf board on my face.:smack:
Smaller silverware. “If you can’t take smaller bites, then you need to eat with the baby spoon.”
Dinner time has always been a big deal in our family. We rarely eat breakfast or lunch together, but we’ve really never NOT eaten dinner together. It’s an important time when everybody is around and nobody is busy. He’s used to it so us leaving the table is definitely noticeable and undesirable.
It wasn’t meant to be a punishment; it really is unpleasant sitting next to somebody who is grossly and loudly chomping their food. It’s nasty. And, while he wasn’t necessarily doing it intentionally, it was obviously something that he could control. And we did offer reminders which lasted about two seconds before he’d be at it again.
“Accidents” are one-offs. I knock over a glass of milk: that’s an accident.
If I knock over my glass of milk every time I sat down at the table, that no longer fits “accident.” It’s a predictable pattern that is a direct consequence of me not paying attention to my surroundings. It may not be willful or deliberate, like throwing the glass onto the floor would be, but I damn well need to learn to pay attention.
There were four siblings, in the house I grew up in, and Mom eventually tired of playing enforcer at the dinner table, reminding this one, then that one, it was unending. For the kids it became like white noise, we just tuned out.
She set up a tv tray table down the hall, (out of earshot of dinner converstion), facing the wall, with cutlery, chair, napkin, condiments, etc. Then she laid down the law; we knew the rules, we were old enough to understand, she was weary of ragging, she was done. If you can’t eat in a mannerly fashion, you are destined to eat alone throughout life, you might as well start now.
Within one week, no more tray table, no more ragging, (an occasional reminder, “Don’t make me set up a hall table for you!”), we were all up to speed in one big leap forward. It wasn’t presented as punishment so much as, the rest of us don’t want to look at that - and I’m tired of telling you.
Nothing like being removed from the group, unable to participate in the nightly banter, to get an uncooperative 7 yr old on board.
It worked a charm on us.
Heh - your mom went to the same school of momming as my mom, elbows. She also had four kids - you don’t have a lot of time to raise precious snowflakes when you have four kids under 10. 
The task may be harder than you think. I had problems with this, more with smacking than open moth, and had some humiliations as an adolescent. I think I’m pretty civilized now, but still can’t eat cold cereal in public. I can’t whistle either–I think I must have some kind of weakness in my lips. Anyway, I’d be open to the possibility that the task takes real concentration. Is he better with fewer people around, less noise? If its actually hard, the more you can remind him quietly, the better. I think that, for me, the mirror would have helped because it would have given me constant feedback.
Admittedly, I was probably about 2 or 3 years old, but this is part of how my parents figured out that I have absolutely no depth perception. I constantly knocked things over (and would be genuinely surprised by it!). I never grew out of it; I still have to be careful when reaching for something within about an arm’s length distance around me because I’m likely to brush up against something else next to/slightly in front of it. There’s nothing to be done about it - it’s just an ophthamological oddity.
Reminds me of the Desk of Shame in my 10th grade math class, where students were banished to sit at this lonely desk when they misbehaved.
I think I may have chewed with my mouth open as a child, though I don’t really remember it. I do remember my big brother MOOOOOOing at me for the way I was chewing/eating something, though, and I was embarrassed enough to spend time looking at other people eating to see what I was doing wrong. I was also a slow eater, and now I tend to eat too quickly after all the teasing I endured as a kid!
My autistic teenage client had the same problem. (Along with lip-smacking, shoving food, getting food all over his hands and face, eating too fast, etc.) Prompting him to look in the mirror, positive verbal reinforcement for the correct behavior, and reprimands for incorrect behavior, and telling him he was never going to get a girlfriend if he ate like that did not work. What did work was removing his plate for 30 seconds every time he exhibited inappropriate eating behavior.
Heh, that’s me exactly, right down to the question about pants.
My stepsister had a problem when we were teens. She was constantly reminded until we were all sick of reminding her. Then she was videotaped. Once she got a load of herself eating like a pig, she vowed to change her ways. We developed a reminder “code word” the family would use in public so no one had to say anything directly about it, we would just say to her “remember our little secret?” whenever she forgot and open-mouth chewed again. It worked over the course of a few months.
The mirror idea is a good one, too. I would try that or the video.