Quick answer
Myofunctional therapy is an exercise program that retrains how a child’s tongue, lips, and jaw rest and move. It targets patterns like mouth breathing, tongue thrust, and low tongue posture. Most children train for six to twelve months with weekly or biweekly sessions plus daily home practice. Evidence is strongest for snoring and sleep-disordered breathing and weaker for changing jaw shape. myofunctional therapy
What is myofunctional therapy for kids?
Myofunctional therapy is physical therapy for the mouth. It uses repeated, targeted exercises to retrain the muscles of the tongue, lips, cheeks, and jaw so they rest and function correctly.
The conditions it treats are called orofacial myofunctional disorders. This is a cluster of muscle-pattern problems that includes tongue thrust, habitual mouth breathing, low tongue resting posture, and open-mouth posture at rest. Tongue thrust means the tongue pushes forward during swallowing instead of staying up against the roof of the mouth.
These are learned neuromuscular habits. Like any motor habit, they can be retrained with deliberate practice. A child doesn’t decide to breathe through their mouth. The pattern gets established, usually early, often for a structural reason like chronic congestion or a tongue tie. Therapy works on the pattern, and where relevant, alongside treatment of the structural cause.
Myofunctional therapy is not braces. It’s not surgery. It’s not a device. It’s a training program, and its results depend almost entirely on whether the exercises actually get done.
Does myofunctional therapy actually work?
Most pages on this topic don’t answer this honestly. The evidence is real but uneven. It’s reasonably good for sleep-disordered breathing and snoring. It’s thinner than most clinics imply for changing the jaw and facial structure.
Where the evidence is strongest
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in Sleep in 2015 found that myofunctional therapy reduced the apnea-hypopnea index, the standard measure of sleep apnea severity, by roughly 50% in adults and 62% in children. The authors concluded it works best as an adjunct to other treatments, not a replacement for them.
A later pediatric-specific meta-analysis in Sleep Medicine, published in 2020, pooled 10 studies covering 241 children. The apnea-hypopnea index fell from 4.32 to 2.48 events per hour, a 43% reduction that was statistically significant.
Where it gets more complicated
A 2025 network meta-analysis of 15 randomized controlled trials, covering 473 adults and 139 children, found clear improvements in subjective measures like daytime sleepiness and sleep quality scores. It found no statistically significant change in the apnea-hypopnea index in the pooled trial data.
A 2026 overview in the Journal of Sleep Research re-analyzed nine systematic reviews covering 716 participants. It found that myofunctional therapy outperformed controls on several outcomes in adults. It described the pediatric evidence as sparse, noted that most underlying studies carry a high risk of bias, and called for more research in children.
What does that mean for your child?
The direction of effect is favorable across the literature. Effect sizes in uncontrolled studies run larger than in controlled ones, and the pediatric evidence base is smaller than anyone would like.
That’s a reasonable basis for offering therapy as part of a plan. It’s not a basis for promising outcomes. A clinic that tells you myofunctional therapy will definitely widen your child’s palate or eliminate the need for braces is going beyond what the research supports.
For tongue thrust and the speech-sound errors that ride along with it, the clinical track record is longer and less contested. Speech-language pathologists have worked in this territory for decades.
Signs your child may need myofunctional therapy
Most of these signs don’t look like dental problems, which is why they get missed. Mouth breathing is usually the first thing parents notice, an open mouth at rest, especially during sleep. It’s often the entry point into everything else on this list, since chronic mouth breathing tends to drag tongue posture, sleep quality, and jaw development along with it.
Breathing
The mouth opens at rest. Breathing through the mouth while asleep. Chronic congestion. Dark circles under the eyes.
Sleep
Snoring. Restless or thrashing sleep. Night sweats. Bedwetting past the usual age. Waking up tired. Daytime irritability or attention problems.
Tongue and swallowing
Tongue visibly pushes forward between the teeth when swallowing. Tongue tie. Drooling past toddler age. Picky eating or slow eating.
Speech
Lisp. Trouble with s, z, sh, ch, th sounds. Speech therapy has plateaued.
Teeth and jaw
Open bite. Crowding with no family history. Teeth shifting after braces. Nighttime grinding.
Habits
Thumb or finger sucking past age three or four. Prolonged pacifier use. Nail biting. Chewing on shirts, pencils, or hair.
A useful check you can do at home is watching your child watch TV. Where is their tongue, and are their lips together? A resting mouth should be closed, with the tongue resting against the roof of the mouth. If the mouth hangs open, that’s worth an evaluation.
One important caveat. Snoring and mouth breathing in children are frequently caused by enlarged tonsils and adenoids, allergies, or a deviated septum. Those are ENT and allergy problems, not muscle problems. A responsible evaluation rules them out first. Myofunctional therapy layered on top of an untreated airway obstruction is treating the wrong thing. We refer out when that’s what we find.
What actually happens in a myofunctional therapy session
Parents ask this constantly, and almost nobody answers it.
A session typically runs 30 to 45 minutes. Your child sits with the therapist. No chair reclining, no instruments, no numbing. They work through a small set of exercises in front of a mirror, the therapist corrects form, and a short set of new ones gets assigned for home.
Home practice is the actual treatment. Sessions are coaching; the reps are what change the pattern. Realistically, yeah,y that’s a few minutes, twice a day. This is the honest hinge point of the whole program. Children whose families do the home practice make progress. Children whose families don’t, don’t. We’d rather tell you that up front than six months in.
A typical progression moves from awareness, finding the tongue’s correct resting spot, to strength and coordination, to lip seal and nasal breathing, to correct swallowing, and finally to making the new pattern automatic so it holds without conscious effort.
Here’s what the exercises actually look like.
Tongue spot. Resting the tongue tip on the ridge just behind the upper front teeth, holding, repeating. Builds awareness of correct posture.
Suction holds. Suctioning the whole tongue flat to the palate and holding it there.
Lip seal work. Holding the lips gently closed against light resistance.
Nasal breathing drills. Short, structured periods of deliberate nose breathing.
Swallow retraining. Practicing a swallow that keeps the tongue up and off the teeth. This is the core exercise for tongue thrust, since a thrust is really just an incorrect swallow pattern repeated thousands of times a week.
For a child who mouth-breathes specifically, the program leans harder on the nasal breathing drills and lip seal work. It’s less about the tongue and more about retraining the lips to stay closed at rest and the nose to do the work of breathing again. We screen for a physical blockage first, enlarged tonsils or adenoids, allergies, a deviated septum, because exercises can’t retrain around an airway that’s mechanically obstructed.
These are illustrative, not a program. Doing exercises without an evaluation risks reinforcing the wrong pattern or drilling around an unaddressed tongue tie. That’s why we assess before assigning anything.
At what age should kids start myofunctional therapy?
Most children are ready between the ages of 6 and 12. That window matters because it’s when children can reliably follow instructions, self-monitor, and stick with home practice, while the facial bones are still growing.
Ages 4 to 5 can work for simpler goals, such as breaking a thumb-sucking habit and early awareness work. Expect a more play-based approach and shorter attention spans.
Under 4, formal therapy generally isn’t appropriate. Habit and airway issues at that age are addressed differently, often starting with an ENT or allergy workup.
Teens and adults benefit too. Results take longer because you’re no longer working with active growth, but the muscle retraining itself works at any age.
The honest framing isn’t “earlier is always better.” It’s early enough to be cooperative, while growth is still active. A frustrated four-year-old who won’t do the exercises isn’t getting a head start. They’re getting a bad first experience with therapy.
How much does myofunctional therapy cost?
Pricing varies by practice and by how much a child’s program includes, so treat any number you see online as a rough guide rather than a quote. Programs are usually priced either per session or as a full package covering the evaluation, a set number of sessions, and progress check-ins.
Several things drive the price. Whether a tongue tie is present and needs to be treated alongside therapy. Whether orthodontic treatment is running in parallel. The severity of the pattern. How many sessions does the child need to reach automaticity? The only way to get an accurate number is a consultation, since the plan is built around what your child specifically needs. A mild habit correction and a full airway-focused program are very different scopes of work. Ask about financing and payment plans at that visit. See our Insurance & Financing page for general options.
Does insurance cover myofunctional therapy?
Usually partially, sometimes not at all, and it depends more on who delivers it than on what it is.
Dental insurance rarely covers myofunctional therapy directly. Most dental plans have no benefit category for it.
Medical insurance is the more likely route, particularly when therapy is tied to a documented diagnosis, sleep-disordered breathing, a swallowing disorder, or a speech disorder.
When a speech-language pathologist delivers the therapy, it’s sometimes billed under speech-therapy treatment codes, depending on the provider and plan.
A physician referral or a sleep study substantially improves the odds of medical coverage. HSA and FSA funds can typically be applied to.
Call the member services number on your card and ask specifically whether orofacial myofunctional therapy is covered, under which benefit, and whether a referral or sleep study is required. Ask them to note the reference number for the call. Our team can also help you understand your options once you’ve had an evaluation.
How long does myofunctional therapy take?
Most children complete an active program in 6 to 12 months.
Evaluation and plan. One to two visits. Assessment, baseline, program design.
Active therapy. Four to eight months. Weekly or biweekly sessions plus daily home practice.
Automaticity. Two to four months. The new pattern becomes unconscious.
Maintenance. Periodic check-ins confirming the pattern holds.
A few things make it longer. An untreated tongue tie. Inconsistent home practice. An unresolved airway obstruction. A younger or less cooperative child.
Consistent daily practice makes it shorter. It’s genuinely the largest variable, and it’s the one you control.
Most families notice changes in sleep and breathing within the first six to eight weeks, well before the program is finished.
Benefits of myofunctional therapy for kids
Pulled together from the evidence and clinical sections above, the realistic list of benefits looks like this.
Better sleep and less snoring are the best-supported benefits, backed by multiple meta-analyses. Correcting tongue thrust and the lisp that often comes with it is well-established territory and often resolves faster than the sleep outcomes. Retraining chronic mouth breathing into nasal breathing reduces the downstream congestion and disrupted sleep it causes. More durable orthodontic results follow, not fewer braces, but braces that are less likely to relapse. Reduced nighttime grinding can follow, too, when the grinding is linked to airway effort rather than stress or misalignment alone. A possible assist to jaw development is plausible but weakly evidenced, and not something to promise a family.
The two benefits parents notice first are almost always sleep and breathing, usually within six to eight weeks, well before the program finishes.
Myofunctional therapy vs. speech therapy
They target different things. Myofunctional therapy addresses muscle function and resting posture. Speech therapy addresses speech sounds, language, and communication. Myofunctional therapy asks why the tongue is in the wrong place. Speech therapy asks what sound is wrong and how to fix it. A trained dentist, hygienist, or speech-language pathologist with orofacial myology training typically provides myofunctional therapy, while a speech-language pathologist provides speech therapy. Myofunctional therapy also touches breathing, swallowing, sleep, and jaw development, where speech therapy stays focused on language, fluency, articulation, and voice.
They overlap, and the overlap is the point. A child with a lisp driven by tongue thrust can grind away at articulation drills for a year with limited progress, because the underlying tongue pattern keeps reasserting itself. Fix the pattern, and the sound often follows.
Plenty of speech-language pathologists are trained in orofacial myology and do both. If your child is already in speech therapy, the most useful question is whether their therapist has that training, not whether to switch providers.
Myofunctional therapy and tongue tie: which comes first?
Tongue tie, or ankyloglossia, is a restrictive band of tissue under the tongue that limits its range of motion. It’s a common structural driver of myofunctional disorders. A tongue that physically cannot reach the roof of the mouth cannot rest there, no matter how much it’s trained.
The sequencing question is the one that matters, and the usual answer is therapy, then release, then therapy.
A few weeks of therapy before release improves tongue mobility and strength and establishes the target pattern. It also clarifies the diagnosis. If therapy alone restores function, the release may not be needed.
The frenectomy itself is a brief procedure releasing the restriction.
Therapy after release retrains the tongue to use its new range. Without this step, the tissue can reattach, and the old compensatory pattern simply resumes.
Release without therapy is the common mistake. The procedure creates the possibility of correct function. It doesn’t create the function on its own. The muscle has spent years learning to work around the restriction and won’t spontaneously unlearn it.
One caveat worth naming. Tongue tie is overdiagnosed in some settings. Not every child with a visible frenulum has a functional restriction requiring surgery. The question isn’t what it looks like; it’s whether tongue function is measurably limited, which is why a proper evaluation looks at movement and mobility, not just appearance.
Can myofunctional therapy help my child avoid braces?
Sometimes it reduces the complexity of orthodontic treatment. It rarely eliminates the need for it, and you should be skeptical of anyone who says otherwise.
Where it genuinely helps is stopping a habit that’s actively making things worse, thumb sucking or tongue thrust, before it deepens. After braces, correcting the muscle pattern that pushes teeth out of position is one of the better defenses against relapse, because if the tongue is still shoving the teeth forward, the teeth will keep moving.
Where the claims outrun the evidence is the idea that tongue posture alone reliably widens the palate and remodels the face. That’s more asserted than demonstrated. It’s biologically plausible, and there’s supportive work, but it isn’t settled science, and it shouldn’t be sold as a guaranteed alternative to orthodontics.
The realistic framing is that myofunctional therapy makes orthodontic results last, and occasionally makes them simpler. It’s not a way to skip them.
If your child has significant crowding or a skeletal discrepancy, they’ll likely still need orthodontic treatment. Therapy makes that treatment more durable. See our myofunctional therapy service page and early orthodontic intervention for how we combine them.
Who is qualified to provide myofunctional therapy?
This matters more than most parents realize, because myofunctional therapy isn’t a licensed profession in its own right. There’s no state license called “myofunctional therapist.” Practitioners come from dentistry, dental hygiene, and speech-language pathology, then add specific training on top.
Credentials worth asking about include COM, Certified Orofacial Myologist, credentialed through the International Association of Orofacial Myology, and the most rigorous designation in the field. Training through AOMT, the Academy of Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy, or a comparable program, is another marker. An underlying clinical license, DDS, DMD, RDH, or CCC-SLP, matters too.
A few questions are worth asking any provider, including us. What’s your training in orofacial myology specifically? Do you screen for tonsils, adenoids, and allergies before starting, and refer out when needed? What does your program measure, and how will I know if it’s working? What happens if my child doesn’t improve?
Our team works from dental and orthodontic training with additional focus on orofacial function, and coordinates with outside speech-language pathologists and ENTs where a child’s needs call for it.
Meet the team on our Meet Our Doctors page.
Is myofunctional therapy safe?
It’s non-invasive and very low-risk. The therapy itself is exercises, no medication, no instruments, no anesthesia. There’s no meaningful physical risk.
Low-risk isn’t the same as no downsides, though. Cost and time add up. It’s a months-long commitment with daily practice, and that’s a genuine burden on a family. There’s an opportunity cos,t too. If a child’s snoring is caused by obstructive tonsils, months of myofunctional therapy delay the treatment that would actually help. That’s the real risk, not the exercises themselves, but what a myofunctional-only lens might miss. Compliance frustration is common as well. A program that isn’t practiced doesn’t work, and that can turn into a source of conflict at home. And the benefit is uncertain for some goals. As above, the evidence for airway and swallowing outcomes is stronger than for skeletal change.
This is why a proper evaluation screens for structural causes first. Therapy is the right tool for a muscle-pattern problem. It’s the wrong tool for a blocked airway.
Myofunctional therapy in Bloomingdale, IL
Owl Pediatric & Orthodontic Dentistry is at 231 South Gary Avenue, Suite 105, Bloomingdale, IL 60108, just off Army Trail Road. We see families from Bloomingdale, Glendale Heights, Carol Stream, Roselle, Addison, Schaumburg, and the surrounding Chicagoland area.
Phone: 630-351-4440 Hours: Monday through Thursday 88 amto 5 pm, Friday 8 am to 3 pm.
A first visit includes an evaluation of tongue function, breathing, swallowing, and resting posture, followed by a discussion of findings and a proposed plan, so you leave knowing whether therapy is recommended and what it would involve.
Sessions can be arranged around your family’s schedule, including after-school and weekday slots, so ongoing therapy doesn’t compete with school or other activities.
No referral needed. Book an appointment or contact our team.
Frequently asked questions
Does myofunctional therapy hurt?
No. The exercises are gentle and use no instruments. Some children report mild tongue or jaw fatigue early on, similar to any new muscle work. It resolves within a week or two.
Can we just do the exercises at home from YouTube?
You can try, and some families see partial results. The risks are drilling the wrong pattern without correction and missing a structural cause, a tongue tie, or an obstructed airway, which makes the exercises futile. An evaluation is worth it even if you then do most of the work yourselves.
What if my child won’t cooperate?
Common, and usually an age or approach problem rather than a character problem. Under 6, we often wait or use a more play-based approach. We’d rather delay than burn a child out on therapy.
Is myofunctional therapy the same as Myobrace or HealthyStart?
No. Those are appliance systems, devices worn in the mouth. Myofunctional therapy is exercise-based with no device, though some practices combine the two. If a program is being sold to you primarily as a device, ask what the exercise protocol is and who supervises it.
How do I know if my child has a tongue thrust?
Watch them swallow a sip of water while you gently hold their lips apart. If the tongue pushes forward against or between the front teeth, that’s a thrust pattern. Other signs include an open bite, a lisp, or teeth that don’t meet in front. A clinical evaluation confirms it.
Will my child’s teeth shift back after braces without this?
Possibly. Relapse is common, and an uncorrected tongue thrust is one of its known drivers. Retainers hold teeth mechanically. Myofunctional therapy addresses the force pushing against them.
Does insurance cover it?
Sometimes, usually through medical rather than dental benefits, and more often when a diagnosis and referral are documented. See the insurance section above for what to ask.