What is Pica Behavior?
If you’re raising someone with autism who puts non-food items in their mouth, you’re dealing with pica behavior—and you’re not alone. After 35 years raising his severely autistic son, Mike Carr knows firsthand how scary and exhausting this can be.
When Everyday Items Become Dangerous
Mike’s son has eaten rocks, leaves, deer droppings, dirt, and even bit into a chlorine tablet from their pool—a terrifying moment that sent them scrambling to call poison control. The chemicals burned his throat so badly he couldn’t speak for days.
At home, Mike’s son would chew t-shirts to shreds, suck toothpaste straight from the tube, and take bites of deodorant. In grocery stores, he’d grab and bite produce without removing peels or considering if it was ready to eat.
Every parent of a child with pica knows that heart-stopping moment of “What did he just put in his mouth?!”
Real Solutions from a Real Dad
Through years of trial and error, Mike found approaches that actually worked:
His wife noticed their son only chewed 100% cotton shirts but ignored polyester ones. This simple discovery led them to replace items throughout their home—switching to polyester napkins and different clothing that wouldn’t trigger the chewing behavior.
For walks outdoors—prime time for picking up leaves and dirt—Mike carries protein bars and offers tiny pieces while counting aloud. It gives his son something appropriate to focus on instead.
At home, they’ve locked cabinets containing toothpaste and other tempting items, secured food in pantries, and created spaces where everyone can relax without constant worry.
Why Does Pica Happen?
Mike learned that pica often has underlying causes:
Sometimes nutritional deficiencies drive unusual cravings. His son might also seek certain sensory experiences or genuinely struggle to distinguish between food and non-food items.
For behaviors that seem attention-seeking, Mike found that sometimes ignoring the less dangerous ones works best. When his son puts a non-poisonous leaf in his mouth while making eye contact, reacting strongly only encourages more of the same.
You’re Not Alone in This
Living with someone who has pica is exhausting. The constant vigilance wears you down. But as Mike discovered, careful observation of patterns and triggers can lead to solutions that make everyday life safer.
Each small victory counts—whether it’s finding the right fabric that won’t be chewed, discovering an effective distraction, or just making it through a day without an emergency.
If you’re struggling with pica behaviors, reach out to autism support organizations and remember that other parents understand what you’re going through. With patience and consistent strategies, many families find they can reduce the dangers pica presents and focus more on enjoying life together.
Pica Behavior Prevention: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xWHM9KAq0krwjSmJoUo2Xv6p5FoWmFSF/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117396057509546423917&rtpof=true&sd=true
Transcript
Mike Carr (00:04):
Hello there. I’m Mike Carr. I’m the dad of a 30 5-year-old severely autistic son, and I want to talk about PICA behavior prevention, which also gets into mal being a little bit too. So we’ve been doing this and living with this for decades, and I want to share with you first of all what Pica behavior is, and then examples of all kinds of things you perhaps have experienced with your son or daughter and some of the solutions that we’ve come up with. Now, I’m not a clinician, I’m not giving you medical advice, I’m trying to talk to you as a parent, and so that’s how please you everything that I’m suggesting from that light. So what is PICA behavior? Well, it’s when your son or daughter or our son picks something up, puts it in his mouth and tries to eat it, but he normally would not do that.
(00:53):
And so that’s the basic of layman’s definition. I know you can get in all the more technical stuff, but that’s how I would think about it. So what does our son eat? And maybe your son eats or tries to eat, so rocks he’ll go along and just pick up a rock and swallow it like, okay, why’d you do that? Leaves? Which isn’t the best thing to eat, especially if they’re poisonous. You have to be careful of that. We lived in Lago Vista, Texas for a while. Deer were everywhere, and believe it or not, it sounds very gross. He’d pick up deer poop, which looked like little raisins and stick a mill in mouth, dirt sticks. He’ll suck the toothpaste right out of a toothpaste tube. It’ll take a bite out of deodorant and a whole lot more. So lemme tell you one story that got to be pretty serious.
(01:36):
So we had a pool in Lago Vista and our son loved to swim, and a lot of autistic boys and girls liked water for a variety of reasons. There’s a genetic component that some folks had discovered that if you have this gene for this predisposition that’s evidently inherited or genetic, you’re constantly thirsty. And we believe our son’s this way. And so he would constantly want to drink water. And of course he was attracted to pools and that kind of stuff. So we were out there and he was playing the pool and seemed to be having a good time, so we weren’t paying that much attention. And all of a sudden he let out a scream, I mean a big scream. And Michael never screams. He has a very delayed pain response and sometimes when he’s hurting, he’ll actually laugh. So when we heard this death defy, I mean scary, scary scream, we both looked up and he had in his hand a white tablet with a chunk taken out of it.
(02:32):
What he had done is he had reached his hand into the skimmer, gone down and picked up a three inch chlorine tab, bitten it, swallowed a piece of it. Of course, it just burned like the dickens when it was going down his throat and he let out a scream. So we rushed over like, holy cow, are you kidding me and my wife being so proactive and so detail oriented, head up on our fridge, a bunch of phone numbers, one of which was poison control. And so we called poison control and they said, well, in this case you just want to drink a lot of milk, which we happen to have on hand, and that neutralizes the acid or whatever the chemicals are on a chlorine tablet, and as long as you get enough milk down, he’ll be okay. And so thank God he was okay.
(03:16):
He didn’t talk for about three days, couldn’t talk at all. I imagine his throat was very sore and burned, but pika behavior is nothing to screw around with. I mean, depending upon what is swallowed, it might mean a trip to the er, which we were concerned that we might do or who knows what, right? I mean, we’ll take him into the grocery store and we don’t pay attention. He’s in the fresh produce section. He’ll pick something up and just stick it in his mouth, a banana without removing the banana peel because he thinks you can eat the banana peel or he doesn’t really understand the difference between what’s truly edible and what’s not edible. So let’s talk about some of the solutions. So one of the things that he likes to do is he likes to chew on his t-shirts, especially the a hundred percent cotton, which of course is age inappropriate, makes a huge mess, destroys the t-shirt and everything else.
(04:03):
It’s okay all on her own, my wife all on her own. Very cool. Figured out that well, he doesn’t eat certain shirts. So what’s the difference between this shirt that he’s not eating, not putting in his mouth, and a shirt that he’s constantly putting in his mouth? It’s the fabric. A hundred percent cotton shirts, he’ll just devour because they get all soggy and gross. And I guess he likes the tactile feel of that knitted shirts or polyester shirts. He will not chew, he doesn’t want to put those in his mouth. So save yourself a lot of grief and money if you’ve got this problem. And maybe try a niche shirt or polyester shirt if your son or daughter is chewing shirts and see if that works. Likewise with napkins, I mean our son would take a napkin.
(04:48):
I mean he put the entire napkin in his mouth and if we weren’t paying attention, swallow it and maybe choke on it. So cave got polyester cloth napkins, and sure enough he won’t put those in his mouth because they don’t taste good and they don’t get all slimy and they don’t collect the moisture and all that kind of stuff. Let’s talk about the plants. We tried coming up with different sprays. We put Tabasco sauce in a sprayer and that sort of worked with houseplant vinegar he loves. So it doesn’t work at all. As a matter of fact, that might be an attractant if you spray a plant with vinegar. So we’ve had mixed results with that. I think what works better for us for certain things is if it’s not poisonous, we ignore the behavior. So if he’s putting a plant leaf in his mouth and he’s looking right at you, and as soon as you react, he knows he’s got you, he knows he’s won the game, so then he’s going to chew more of him.
(05:45):
But if you just ignore the behavior, it doesn’t taste very good, he’s going to spit it out because it didn’t elicit the reaction. Like why was he doing it in the first place? Well, he wanted attention perhaps. And so in those situations, some kind of behavior ignoring and just, again, it can’t be something that’s going to harm him like a big rock or who knows what. The other thing we’ve done in his living space is we lock a lot of stuff up, and this seems pretty obvious, but you’ll lock up all the food in the pantry. You’ll lock the kitchen so he can’t get in for puzzle pieces and small things out in his play area. You put them in childproof containers or you might lock them in a filing cabinet in his bathroom. We’ve actually put anything he can suck out of a tube, whether it’s toothpaste or an antibiotic cream or his deodorant that he likes to take a big chunk out of.
(06:35):
That’s always in a cabinet underneath the sink that has one of these plastic, not really a lock, but you have to move the little plastic piece out before you can open the cabinet and he can’t figure out how to do that. And so whether you have to lock it, something he cannot get into has worked really, really well for us. I think those are the solutions that I wanted to share with you. There are other things that are discussed in literature and there’s some great resources out there. One of them is by Autism Speaks Autism Treatment Center, and also the Autism Intervention Research Network on Physical Health. And the title of this is Just pica, A Guide for Professionals. So I’ll include a link. It’s about a seven page PDF. I’ll include a link in the show notes and you guys can go out and pick this thing up if you want.
(07:22):
It’s helpful. It’s pretty clinician oriented, but does give you some great tips and techniques. But one of the things that’s pointed out in this document and some of the other research we’ve done is one of the causes of PICA could be nutritional deficiency, right? There’s an iron deficiency or there’s a zinc deficiency. And so there’s this urge to eat to overcome whatever that apparent vitamin deficiency is driving that behavior. So getting your kiddo checked out for some kind of a deficiency is often something that clinicians will advise. Sensory seeking behaviors where children eat something because it’s enjoyable and they don’t understand the difference between what something is they can eat and something they can’t eat. Like when we took Michael into the grocery store in the fresh produce section, he’d probably take a raw potato and put in his mouth and take a big chunk out of it and eat it.
(08:15):
We didn’t understand that he likes cooked potatoes and they look the same, but a raw potato isn’t going to go and deliver quite the same sensation. One of the things that I’ve done, and I’m going to share this a bit embarrassed because this is a dad thing, this is not something that mom, mom would not approve of this. She would not approve of me talking to you guys about this, but what am I going to do? I’m the dad. I have some freedom is I will take a bar with me when we walk and I’ll take Littley bitty pieces of the bar and I’ll give them to him, which he likes a lot. He likes it more than leaves and dirt and all this other stuff. And he knows he’ll get one. If he doesn’t do the leaf stuff and we walk a certain distance, then I’ll count.
(08:59):
So I might count to a hundred and Michael 1, 2, 3, 4. So we speed up the cadence and we’re getting walking in and he likes to walk. He’s outside and he’s thinking about that little piece of that Atkins bar, whatever it’s I’m going to give him. And when we get to a hundred, I’ll stop and I’ll give him a little piece. And so I think what I’m doing there is I’m taking his mind off. How can I get dad’s attention because he has my attention because I’m counting with him and he knows he is going to get a little reward, a small piece of a bar, power bar or a protein bar, in this case, an Atkins bar because we’re trying to keep ’em on a low carb diet. He has seizures. Anyway, that’s a whole nother discussion. But anyway, that combination of offering an edible reward and then singing or counting with them when we walk has worked pretty well to mitigate, eliminate pica behavior. So those are the things I want to leave with you today. I’ll put that reference. Please come back to the Autism Lab’s website, YouTube channel because we will try to provide other information on a variety of topics that we’ve discovered through working with our son for 35 years. Have a great day now. See you.
