Ithaca Myofunctional Therapy

Call Directions Website

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.

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.

10/21/2026

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. It doesn't speak to the areas that weren't.

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.

Myofunctional therapy is specific in what it does. It works on oral muscle function — the resting position of the tongue...
10/20/2026

Myofunctional therapy is specific in what it does. It works on oral muscle function — the resting position of the tongue and lips, the swallowing pattern, the breathing habits that operate at rest, and the functional preparation and rehabilitation around procedures like tongue tie releases. That is a meaningful and distinct scope of work.

It is not a structural diagnosis. It does not replace dental or orthodontic treatment. It does not perform medical evaluations of the airway. It is not speech therapy, and it does not make surgical decisions.

Being clear about this matters for a few reasons. It helps patients and families know when a referral to a different provider is the right next step. It prevents the kind of inflated expectation that leads to disappointment. And it describes how myofunctional therapy actually works best — as one informed piece of a coordinated care picture, not as a standalone solution to complex, multifactorial problems.

The practices that do this work well tend to be ones that communicate clearly about their scope, refer appropriately, and understand that being honest about what they cannot do is part of what makes what they can do genuinely useful.

If you are trying to figure out whether myofunctional therapy is the right next step for yourself or your child, this is a useful frame for that decision.

Save this as a reference. Visit the link in bio to book an assessment or ask whether this is the right fit for your situation.

Myofunctional therapy is specific in what it does. It works on oral muscle function — the resting position of the tongue...
10/19/2026

Myofunctional therapy is specific in what it does. It works on oral muscle function — the resting position of the tongue and lips, the swallowing pattern, the breathing habits that operate at rest, the functional preparation and rehabilitation around procedures like tongue tie releases. That is a meaningful and distinct scope of work.

It is not a structural diagnosis. It does not replace dental or orthodontic treatment. It does not perform medical evaluations of the airway. It is not speech therapy, and it does not make surgical decisions.

Being clear about this matters for a few reasons. It helps patients and families know when a referral to a different provider is the right next step. It prevents the kind of inflated expectation that leads to disappointment. And it describes how myofunctional therapy actually works best — as one informed piece of a coordinated care picture, not as a standalone solution to complex, multifactorial problems.

The practices that do this work well tend to be ones that communicate clearly about their scope, refer appropriately, and understand that being honest about what they cannot do is part of what makes what they can do genuinely useful.

If you are trying to figure out whether myofunctional therapy is the right next step for yourself or your child — this is a useful frame for that decision.

The way your teeth come together, what dentists refer to as occlusion, is not just a dental detail. It has a direct rela...
10/18/2026

The way your teeth come together, what dentists refer to as occlusion, is not just a dental detail. It has a direct relationship with the muscles that open and close the jaw, the joint that those muscles move, and the tension patterns that can develop when any part of that system is working harder than it should.

When the teeth meet evenly, the load of chewing and jaw movement is distributed across the teeth and musculature in a relatively balanced way. When there is asymmetry (the teeth contact more heavily on one side, or the bite requires the jaw to shift slightly to find a contact position), the muscles on the loaded side compensate. Over time, that compensation can produce the kind of chronic, one-sided jaw tension that feels impossible to fully resolve.

This is not the same as saying that bite alignment is always the primary explanation for jaw pain. The relationship between occlusion and jaw muscle function is one piece of a larger picture that includes how the tongue rests, how the jaw is held at rest, and how the muscles function during sleep.

But it is a piece that often goes unexamined in conversations about jaw tension, particularly for people who have been managing symptoms without understanding what may be driving the muscular load in the first place.

If you carry tension consistently on one side of your jaw, or if certain movements feel notably different from left to right, the loading pattern your bite creates may be worth exploring alongside the muscle function picture.

Visit the link in bio to learn more or book an initial assessment.

10/17/2026

A night guard is a genuinely useful tool. It creates a barrier between the upper and lower teeth that prevents the kind of damage that clenching and grinding can cause over time.

What it doesn't do is address the pattern that's producing the habit in the first place.

Nighttime clenching and grinding is most often discussed in terms of stress — and stress is a real contributing factor. But the muscular component of the pattern exists independently of what's happening in someone's life on any given week. The jaw has a resting position it returns to during sleep. The tongue has a resting posture that either supports that position and the airway or — doesn't.

These are functional variables. And they're the kind of variables that myofunctional therapy looks at directly.

If you've been wearing a night guard consistently and are still waking up with jaw tension, soreness, or headaches — that gap between the protection the guard provides and the experience you're still having is worth understanding.

Drop a question in the comments or visit the link in bio to book a Q+A.

Most of the conversation about mouth breathing focuses on what happens during sleep — the snoring, the restless nights, ...
10/16/2026

Most of the conversation about mouth breathing focuses on what happens during sleep — the snoring, the restless nights, the morning symptoms. And those things matter.

But mouth breathing doesn't stop when the alarm goes off. For children who breathe habitually through their mouths, the pattern continues through the school day — and it can show up in ways that look like attention issues, low energy, or behavioral patterns rather than a breathing pattern.

A child who drifts by early afternoon, whose mouth is consistently open during quiet desk work, who arrives home exhausted after a day that wasn't particularly taxing, who has chronically dry or chapped lips — these are observations that can have a breathing component. They're also observations that are easy to attribute to other causes, which is part of why the breathing piece often goes unaddressed.

Nasal breathing supports more efficient oxygen exchange and keeps the tongue in a resting position that supports the palate and airway. When mouth breathing is the default during the day, the body is working with a slightly less efficient system across every activity — and in a child still developing, that difference has reach.

None of this is a diagnosis. It's a set of observations that are worth bringing to someone who looks at breathing and oral function in children.

A frenectomy — the procedure that releases a tongue tie restriction — can be a genuinely important intervention. For inf...
10/15/2026

A frenectomy — the procedure that releases a tongue tie restriction — can be a genuinely important intervention. For infants, children, and adults whose tongue function has been limited by restricted tissue, releasing that restriction is a meaningful step.

But the procedure is one part of a larger process, and it's the part that sometimes gets treated as all that's needed.

The tongue has been functioning within a restriction, potentially for years. The movement patterns it developed around that restriction — how it rests, how it moves during swallowing, how it's able to move freely — don't automatically change when the tissue is cut or revised. They need to be actively retrained.

There's also the healing process to consider. After a release — without stretching, exercises and active tongue movement during the healing window, that tissue can tighten or reattach and the functional gain of the procedure can be reduced.

Myofunctional therapy works both before and after a tongue tie release. Before, it prepares the tongue muscles so they are primed for the procedure. After, it guides the retraining process and helps ensure the release translates into real functional change.

If you or your child has had a release and felt like the results were incomplete — or if you're preparing for a procedure and want to understand the full picture — this is worth knowing.

Save this and share it with anyone navigating the tongue tie process. Link in bio to book a consultation or ask questions.

10/14/2026

Starting myofunctional therapy as an adult comes with a particular kind of surprise that nobody really warns you about: the exercises feel strange in a way that has nothing to do with difficulty.

They're not hard. They're unfamiliar. Moving the tongue in specific patterns, holding the lips together consciously, practicing a swallow that feels nothing like the one you've been doing automatically for decades — it's the muscular equivalent of being handed a pen and asked to write with your non-dominant hand. You can do it. It just takes a moment to find where the movement is supposed to come from.

That unfamiliarity is actually useful information. It means you're accessing patterns that haven't been consciously trained before. The muscles are there. They just haven't been asked to do this yet.

The shift happens gradually. A few weeks in, most people notice that something that required active attention — keeping the mouth closed, noticing tongue resting position — starts to happen without the thought. The new pattern is beginning to take hold. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But measurably.

If you've been on the edge of reaching out and the uncertainty about what you're signing up for has been part of what's held you back — this is what it actually feels like. Strange at first. Genuinely incremental. Worth it.

Jaw clicking is something a lot of people have been told not to worry about. And sometimes that's accurate — not every c...
10/13/2026

Jaw clicking is something a lot of people have been told not to worry about. And sometimes that's accurate — not every click is clinically significant, and many people have jaw sounds that don't cause any symptoms or discomfort.

But "it's common" can have a way of becoming "it doesn't matter," and those two things aren't the same.

The jaw joint is surrounded by muscles that play a direct role in how it moves. The position of the tongue at rest, the way the jaw is held during the day and night, the pattern of how the teeth come together — all of these influence the environment in which the jaw joint operates. When those factors are contributing to how the joint is loading or moving, the clicking or popping is a signal from that environment, not just a random mechanical sound.

That doesn't mean jaw clicking always requires treatment. It means it's worth understanding rather than categorically dismissing.

A myofunctional evaluation looks at the oral and jaw muscle function that can be relevant to TMJ symptoms — the resting position of the tongue, the tone of the muscles of the jaw and face, how the jaw is being held at rest. That's one piece of a larger picture, and it often works best alongside evaluation from a dentist or specialist who is also looking at the joint itself.

If jaw clicking has been a part of your experience that no one has explained to you, that explanation may be worth seeking.

Visit the link in bio to learn more or book a consultation. Happy to discuss what a myofunctional evaluation covers and whether it might be relevant to your situation.

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

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Ithaca Myofunctional Therapy posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category