Ithaca Myofunctional Therapy

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Ithaca Myofunctional Therapy Root-cause care for better breathing and whole-body wellness.

Ashley Babb is a myofunctional therapist in Ithaca offering in-person and virtual sessions throughout the Finger Lakes for tongue ties, mouth breathing, oral habits, sleep, and jaw health.

This one comes up a lot with parents of toddlers, and I always want to lead with the same thing: there is no judgment he...
10/31/2026

This one comes up a lot with parents of toddlers, and I always want to lead with the same thing: there is no judgment here. Sippy cups exist because they prevent messes. Most of us used them.

But it is worth understanding how they may encourage your child's swallowing pattern, because the cup a young child uses is not just a convenience. It is part of how they practice using their mouth.

Bottles and sippy cups encourage a sucking motion that keeps the tongue pushing forward in a way that does not facilitate the swallowing pattern we want to develop. The longer it continues, the longer that transition is delayed.

Open cups ask the tongue and lips to coordinate differently. Drinking from an open cup, even a small practice one with handles, is one of the early ways a child starts building the patterns that matter down the road. A regular straw can be a good middle step: it is not identical to open cup drinking, but it is a meaningfully different motion from a sippy cup spout.

None of this means every child who used a sippy cup until age three will have problems. But if oral development, tongue posture, or swallowing patterns are already on your radar, this is one of the small places where the environment at home can support the bigger picture.

Save this for a parent of a toddler who would find it useful. Check the link in Bio if you would like to learn more.

10/30/2026

Something I hear from parents occasionally, usually a few weeks or months into therapy: their child’s speech seems a little clearer. A sound that was always muddy is coming through more consistently. They’re not sure if it’s related or just coincidence.

It’s usually not a coincidence.

Myofunctional therapy isn’t speech therapy, and I want to be clear about that. What it does work on is the resting position of the tongue, the mobility of the tongue, and how those patterns function in the context of breathing and swallowing. And some speech sounds — particularly ones that require specific tongue placement — are built on exactly that foundation.

When a child’s tongue starts resting in a better position and moving more freely, the starting point for those sounds changes. Not always. Not for every child. And for children with significant speech concerns, working with a speech therapist directly is the appropriate path.

But when parents notice it, they’re observing something real. The oral motor foundation shifted, and the sounds that depend on it shifted with it.

Someone gets a bad cold, or a sinus infection, or a stretch of bad allergies, and for a few weeks, nasal breathing just ...
10/29/2026

Someone gets a bad cold, or a sinus infection, or a stretch of bad allergies, and for a few weeks, nasal breathing just isn't possible. So they breathe through their mouth. And at some point the congestion clears, but the habit of breathing through the mouth has quietly settled in.

The nose may have been doing its job automatically before. But habits, even unconscious ones, can shift during stretches when they're interrupted. And nasal breathing, when it hasn't been practiced for a while, can start to feel like more effort than it used to.

This is something I find genuinely interesting about how the body works. The muscles and patterns that support nasal breathing at rest don't disappear, but they can become less automatic when something else has been the default for a while.

If you've noticed that your breathing changed after an illness and never quite went back to what it was, that observation is worth paying attention to. It's not a permanent shift. It's a pattern, and patterns can be worked with.

If this is you, find more information or set up a call to ask questions at the link in bio.

This one is for the adults who have quietly worked around certain foods for as long as they can remember.Not disliking t...
10/28/2026

This one is for the adults who have quietly worked around certain foods for as long as they can remember.

Not disliking them because of flavor. Avoiding them because of something harder to describe — the way a texture feels when it’s in the mouth, the fatigue that sets in after a few bites of something chewy, the sense that chewing is more work than it seems like it should be.

These patterns often start in childhood and become so habitual that they just feel like personality. “I’m a picky eater.” “I have texture issues.” “I just don’t eat that.” And because no one ever flagged it as anything beyond preference, it never got examined.

Oral motor function plays a significant role in how we manage food in the mouth — how the tongue moves food around, how the jaw handles different textures, how efficiently the whole process runs. When there’s a pattern that has made eating certain things consistently difficult, that can sometimes reflect how the oral muscles are coordinating rather than simply what someone likes.
This isn’t something most adults have ever considered. But if this description resonates with an experience you’ve been having since you were a kid, it may be worth a conversation with someone who looks at oral function.

If you've been told you have a lot of cavities for someone who brushes consistently, or that your gums are more inflamed...
10/27/2026

If you've been told you have a lot of cavities for someone who brushes consistently, or that your gums are more inflamed than they should be, and none of it quite makes sense given how well you take care of your mouth, it might be worth thinking about how you breathe.

When we breathe through our mouths, especially at night, the airflow dries out the tissues inside. Saliva is one of the mouth's primary defense systems. It neutralizes acid, remineralizes enamel, and keeps the bacterial environment in check. When the mouth is dry for hours at a time, that protective system is essentially offline.

The result, over months and years, can look like increased cavity risk in areas that don't follow the typical patterns, gum tissue that stays irritated despite good hygiene, and a general sense that your dental health isn't matching your effort.

This isn't something most people connect to breathing. But once you do, a lot of things start to make more sense.

I talk about this a lot with my patients, and I always encourage them to bring it up with their dentist, too. It's one of those pieces that tends to complete the picture.

If any of this sounds familiar, drop a question in the comments or check the link in the comments to learn more about evaluations.

If your jaw has ever locked up — even just for a moment, even if it worked itself out quickly — that’s worth understandi...
10/26/2026

If your jaw has ever locked up — even just for a moment, even if it worked itself out quickly — that’s worth understanding rather than dismissing.

The jaw joint is one of the most complex in the body. It relies on a small disc of cartilage to cushion and guide movement. When the muscles surrounding the joint are under chronic tension, or when the resting position of the jaw is placing ongoing load on that disc, the disc can shift slightly out of its ideal position. When that happens, opening the mouth wide — or sometimes just opening it at all — can feel like something is catching, sticking, or needing to be coaxed into place.
Some people experience this as a jaw that locks closed in the morning and takes a minute to loosen. Others notice it when opening wide for the dentist or eating something that requires a big bite. Some hear a thud or a pop as the disc snaps back into position when the mouth opens past a certain point.

None of these experiences are ones to panic over. But they are observations that point to how the jaw joint and the muscles around it are functioning — and that functional picture is exactly what a myofunctional evaluation looks at.

If this sounds familiar and you’ve just been working around it, it may be worth bringing it into a conversation.

10/25/2026

Shallow chest breathing and low tongue posture are two of the patterns myofunctional therapy works on most consistently. Most people encounter them as separate topics. They tend to be more connected than that.

Here is the relationship. When the tongue rests low in the mouth rather than at the palate, the floor of the airway loses some of its support from below. The body compensates, often by recruiting the muscles of the chest, neck, and shoulders to assist with breathing, which produces a shallower, more upper-body-driven breath rather than the fuller, diaphragm-led breath the body is designed to use at rest.

The loop runs in the other direction too. When breathing is predominantly chest-based, the tongue is less likely to naturally find and hold its correct resting position at the palate. The muscular dynamic of chest breathing keeps the tongue floor-resting as its default.

The practical implication of this is that the two patterns maintain each other. Someone working to improve tongue posture in isolation may find it harder than expected because the breathing pattern is working against them. Someone working to shift toward diaphragmatic breathing may find it more accessible once tongue posture starts to improve.

Myofunctional therapy addresses both, not as two separate problems but as an interconnected system. That is part of what makes the work cumulative rather than additive.

Save this if the connection surprised you. Visit the link in bio to learn more or book a consultation.

10/24/2026

Being told that everything looks normal is supposed to be reassuring. And when it matches how you feel, it is.

When it doesn't match how you feel (when the jaw is still tight, the breathing still takes effort, the fatigue is still there, the facial tension still shows up every morning), a normal result can feel like a door closing rather than an answer arriving.

What a normal result actually means is that nothing was found in the areas that were evaluated...or understood.

The oral and jaw muscle system is one of the most commonly overlooked pieces in complex symptom workups. Resting tongue posture, how the jaw is held during sleep, the swallowing pattern and the cumulative pressure it places on the teeth and jaw over time: these are not part of a standard neurological exam, a dental cleaning, an ENT evaluation, or most physical therapy assessments. They require someone who is looking at oral muscle function specifically.

A myofunctional evaluation doesn't replace any of those assessments. But for people whose symptoms persist after normal results, it often provides a functional explanation for things that have been present but unaccounted for.

If you have been told everything looks fine and something still doesn't feel fine, the functional picture may simply not have been part of the conversation yet.

Visit the link in bio to book a consultation or reach out directly. A first conversation is always low pressure.

Most families encounter myofunctional therapy after orthodontic treatment has already finished — usually because the tee...
10/23/2026

Most families encounter myofunctional therapy after orthodontic treatment has already finished — usually because the teeth have shifted and someone is finally asking why.
The more useful moment to introduce it is before treatment begins.

Here is why the timing matters. Braces move teeth. They do this by applying controlled force in specific directions over time. But the muscles of the tongue, lips, and jaw are also applying force to the teeth — continuously, throughout the day and night. When those muscle forces are working against the direction of orthodontic movement, or when they are not supporting the final position the teeth are being moved into, the treatment is working in a less than ideal functional environment.

When myofunctional therapy comes first — when the tongue has learned its correct resting position, when the swallowing pattern has been retrained, when nasal breathing has become the default — the orthodontic treatment is working with a muscular environment that has been prepared to support the result. The teeth are moving into a space that is ready to hold them.

In growing children, the pre-orthodontic window is also the window during which functional patterns have the most influence on jaw and palate development. The palate is still responsive. The jaw is still adapting. Addressing muscle function during this period takes advantage of developmental flexibility that is not available to the same degree after growth is complete.

If your child's orthodontic evaluation is approaching, this is a conversation worth having before the brackets go on — not after the retainer fails to hold.

Most families encounter myofunctional therapy after orthodontic treatment has already finished — usually because the tee...
10/22/2026

Most families encounter myofunctional therapy after orthodontic treatment has already finished — usually because the teeth have shifted and someone is finally asking why.

The more useful moment to introduce it is before ortho treatment begins.

Here is why the timing matters. Braces move teeth. They do this by applying controlled force in specific directions over time. But the muscles of the tongue, lips, and jaw are also applying force to the teeth — continuously, throughout the day and night. When those muscle forces are working against the direction of orthodontic movement, or when they are not supporting the final position the teeth are being moved into, the treatment is working in a less than ideal functional environment.

When myofunctional therapy comes first — when the tongue has learned its correct resting position, when the swallowing pattern has been retrained, when nasal breathing has become the default — the orthodontic treatment is working with a muscular environment that has been prepared to support the result. The teeth are moving into a space that is ready to hold them.

In growing children, the pre-orthodontic window is also the window during which functional patterns have the most influence on jaw and palate development. The palate is still responsive. The jaw is still adapting. Addressing muscle function during this period takes advantage of developmental flexibility that is not available to the same degree after growth is complete.

If your child's orthodontic evaluation is approaching, this is a conversation worth having before the brackets go on — not after the retainer fails to hold.

Save this for a parent who is in this exact moment. Visit the link in bio to book an assessment or reach out with questions.

Address

310 N Aurora Street
Ithaca, NY
14850

Opening Hours

Monday 8:30am - 4pm
Tuesday 8:30am - 4pm
Wednesday 8:30am - 4pm
Thursday 8:30am - 4pm

Telephone

+6072882865

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